A shadow puppet play, titled Utopiazoo (天堂動物園), that explores the global refugee crisis and racial issues in a child-friendly format opens tomorrow in Taipei.
The play, a collaboration between Marseille, France-based playwright Chou Jung-shih (周蓉詩) and the Flying Group Theatre (飛人集社劇團), is to be staged at the Wellspring Theater through Sunday.
Utopiazoo takes place in an eponymous fantasy land populated by anthropomorphic animals and deals with the interaction between its long-time residents and a new arrival, a refugee pony, Chou said.
The story is an attempt to deal with real-life issues through fable, and it was written to appeal to children, but it is also thought-provoking for adult audiences, she said.
In writing the play Chou drew upon her experience of raising her Taiwanese-French daughter, and their conversations about the refugee crisis and anti-immigration policies, Chou said.
Her daughter’s school in Marseille has many immigrant students whose parents are from the Middle East or Asia, she said.
As a result, the children are exposed to different cultures, and what they can and cannot eat is a frequent topic of discussion at the cafeteria, she said, adding that Muslim classmates once asked her daughter why she ate pork.
“A sense of being different is inevitable for a Chinese-speaking immigrant family,” she said. “Adults cannot avoid discussing seemingly difficult subjects, like terrorism, Catalonia’s independence movement, or the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Chou said.
“Adults do not actually have answers for them,” she said, adding that Taiwan also has racism and discrimination issues that people refuse to recognize, which her play tries to shed light on.
Flying Group Theatre artistic director Shih Pei-yu (石佩玉) said theater should be a platform for the exchange and deliberation of ideas.
“We hope to pose questions on stage to give adults and children an opportunity to confront and debate social issues as equals,” Shih said.
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