With their imminent move to a new base in Hualien County, it will probably be a long while before Taiwan's foremost Aboriginal troupe, the Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe (原舞者), stages another production in Taipei. This weekend's performances at the Novel Hall (新舞台) will also be a celebration of 15 years of endeavoring to preserve Taiwan's Aboriginal ritual traditions. The troupe will present the finest of the traditional songs and dances from six tribes epitomizing the multifarious tribal cultures and social changes that Taiwan's Aboriginal societies have undergone in their long history.
Aiming to preserve and revive the fast disappearing tribal songs and dances, the company was established by a group of young Aboriginals from different tribes in 1991. Part of their goal was to reverse the public's perception that Aboriginal dance was simply a tourist spectacle, bringing out the great ritual and social significance that these acts represent.
Over the years, the company not only has staged hundreds of performances touring around the country, but also holds workshops to re-ignite the interest of young Aboriginals' in traditional dance culture through reinterpretations and integration with contemporary theatrical elements. The troupe has gained considerable international recognition and has performed at art festivals in the US, Belgium, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Singapore and Hong Kong.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FORMOSA ABORIGINAL SONG AND DANCE TROUPE
Each production is based on long-term field observations and participation. Assisted by anthropologists and tribal elders, troupe members and Aboriginal students are dispatched to different villages to study their rituals through the oral tradition. According to artistic director Faidaw Fangod, the duration of each visit to a village is limited to 10 days, to avoid disturbing the tribal life and traditions of their hosts.
“Take the Saisiyat tribe (賽夏族) for example. Their ceremonial songs and dances are regarded as sacred and there is a prohibition on public performance. Teaching outsiders like us thus poses a big challenge to them. We spent lots of time communicating with local residents until the tribal leaders agreed to let us study the rituals after many private meetings,” Fangod explained.
Since Aboriginal tribes exhibit great diversity in terms of language, culture and ritual, one of the biggest challenges for troupe members is to overcome the language barrier. “The tribes' phonic systems differ greatly and there is no unifying model for pronunciation. It's a painstaking task to learn the languages, let alone to familiarize oneself with the diverse ways of singing in different tribes,” said Fangod, an Amis from Taitung.
Featured in the current show is the highly acclaimed 1991 production of Legend of Mountains and Seas featuring the mayasvi ritual from the Tufuya village of the Tsou tribe (鄒族), who live deep in the mountains, and the ilisin ceremony from the coastal Amis tribe (阿美族).
Containing well-preserved ancient language elements whose meaning is no longer fully comprehensible, the mayasvi is a sacred ritual held each year after millet harvest to plead for gods' blessing on the tribe's solidarity, exorcising the evil spirits and paying respects to the dead. The Amis ilisin ritual is held at the end of each year to express gratitude to ancient spirits and supernatural powers. The event is always boisterous since Amis believes the grander the ceremony, the better the harvest in the coming year.
As for their own uncertain future in Hualien, the company's founder remains optimistic and positive. “It's a change of direction. We get to return to our lands and peoples and continue our work to preserve and pass down our cultural heritages,” said Fangod.
There is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plot to put millions at the mercy of the CCP using just released AI technology. This isn’t being overly dramatic. The speed at which AI is improving is exponential as AI improves itself, and we are unprepared for this because we have never experienced anything like this before. For example, a few months ago music videos made on home computers began appearing with AI-generated people and scenes in them that were pretty impressive, but the people would sprout extra arms and fingers, food would inexplicably fly off plates into mouths and text on
On the final approach to Lanshan Workstation (嵐山工作站), logging trains crossed one last gully over a dramatic double bridge, taking the left line to enter the locomotive shed or the right line to continue straight through, heading deeper into the Central Mountains. Today, hikers have to scramble down a steep slope into this gully and pass underneath the rails, still hanging eerily in the air even after the bridge’s supports collapsed long ago. It is the final — but not the most dangerous — challenge of a tough two-day hike in. Back when logging was still underway, it was a quick,
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
RSS