Ma Kuai-dao often fantasizes about his neighbor, the scholar Xu Shen-yu. Ma imagines that he could do his best work on Xu’s sinewy frame, well-proportioned torso and muscular legs. A series of historic events enables Ma to get closer to the object of his musings.
Ma’s reveries are a central plot device that keeps the action moving along at a rapid pace in The Scholar and the Executioner (秀才與劊子手), a contemporary Chinese play produced by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center (上海話劇藝術中心), which makes its Taiwan debut beginning next Thursday at Taipei City’s National Theater. The play, which is part of Taipei Arts International Association’s (TAIA) 2008 World Drama Series, runs until June 8.
Billed as a black comedy, the period piece takes place during the twilight of the Qing Dynasty — a time of considerable social upheaval.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
The award-winning script, written by Chinese theater practitioner and theorist Huang Wei-ruo (黃維若), humorously follows the lives of two men who are affected by the government’s attempt to modernize China’s backward society and, in the process, maintain power.
The first is the executioner and torturer “Fast Knife Ma” (Ma Kuai-dao, 馬快刀). Hailed throughout the region as a professional torturer who inflicts the maximum amount of pain on his victims by shearing off their flesh with a variety of knives — a process known as lingchi (“death by a thousand cuts,” 凌遲) — Ma revels in the adulation that crowds of bystanders bestow on him while engaged in this work.
Xu Shen-yu (徐聖喻) is an unaccomplished scholar who has passed the county examination, a minor test that confers a modicum of reputation on the candidate. But Xu has dreams of becoming a famous official in the imperial bureaucracy and spends all his money preparing for and sitting the provincial examinations, which he always fails. Penniless, he takes a job at a private school to prepare students for the examination he himself has passed.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
One day, Fast Knife Ma’s fantasies of slicing up his neighbor are interrupted by an imperial edict abolishing the national examination system and death sentence. Fast Knife immediately goes into a depression that is only alleviated when his wife, Zhi Zi-hua (梔子花), convinces him to begin a new, and to Ma, less honorable profession: that of a butcher.
At first, Ma finds his job boring — the squeals of the animals are no substitute for the screams of his former victims — but soon gains a certain degree of satisfaction through the process of removing flesh from bone. As Ma’s skills as a butcher improve, he draws the same crowds he did in his former incarnation as torturer and executioner.
With Ma’s newfound success he convinces Xu to quit his job as private tutor and become a butcher as well — an interesting social reversal because the butcher now becomes teacher to the scholar. Tension is also created because the audience is unsure whether Ma will skin his neighbor.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
The play’s comic flavor is enhanced by Huang Hai-wei’s (黃海威) hand-carved wooden masks, which are inspired by the nuo (儺) masks of Sichuan Opera and Italian commmedia. With the exception of the scholar, executioner and his wife, all characters on the stage wear masks — another interesting reversal because in traditional Chinese theater only the lead characters on stage would wear masks.
But does the butcher end up living out his fantasies? You’ll have to watch the show to find out.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIPEI ARTS INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION
Nov. 11 to Nov. 17 People may call Taipei a “living hell for pedestrians,” but back in the 1960s and 1970s, citizens were even discouraged from crossing major roads on foot. And there weren’t crosswalks or pedestrian signals at busy intersections. A 1978 editorial in the China Times (中國時報) reflected the government’s car-centric attitude: “Pedestrians too often risk their lives to compete with vehicles over road use instead of using an overpass. If they get hit by a car, who can they blame?” Taipei’s car traffic was growing exponentially during the 1960s, and along with it the frequency of accidents. The policy
Hourglass-shaped sex toys casually glide along a conveyor belt through an airy new store in Tokyo, the latest attempt by Japanese manufacturer Tenga to sell adult products without the shame that is often attached. At first glance it’s not even obvious that the sleek, colorful products on display are Japan’s favorite sex toys for men, but the store has drawn a stream of couples and tourists since opening this year. “Its openness surprised me,” said customer Masafumi Kawasaki, 45, “and made me a bit embarrassed that I’d had a ‘naughty’ image” of the company. I might have thought this was some kind
What first caught my eye when I entered the 921 Earthquake Museum was a yellow band running at an angle across the floor toward a pile of exposed soil. This marks the line where, in the early morning hours of Sept. 21, 1999, a massive magnitude 7.3 earthquake raised the earth over two meters along one side of the Chelungpu Fault (車籠埔斷層). The museum’s first gallery, named after this fault, takes visitors on a journey along its length, from the spot right in front of them, where the uplift is visible in the exposed soil, all the way to the farthest
The room glows vibrant pink, the floor flooded with hundreds of tiny pink marbles. As I approach the two chairs and a plush baroque sofa of matching fuchsia, what at first appears to be a scene of domestic bliss reveals itself to be anything but as gnarled metal nails and sharp spikes protrude from the cushions. An eerie cutout of a woman recoils into the armrest. This mixed-media installation captures generations of female anguish in Yun Suknam’s native South Korea, reflecting her observations and lived experience of the subjugated and serviceable housewife. The marbles are the mother’s sweat and tears,