The Taipei International Jazz Festival launched its weekend finale on Friday evening at the 228 Peace Park amphitheater with top-notch performances by musicians visiting from the US, Belgium, and the Netherlands, who taught last week at the Taipei International Jazz Academy, an annual one-week summer camp dedicated to cultivating up-and-coming talent in Taiwan. The finale also featured student performances throughout the evening.
The 2,000 or so audience members didn’t seem to mind the typically stuffy summer evening in Taipei as they listened to Dutch vocalist Denise Jannah, who charmed attendees with personable stage banter and her clear, exquisite voice. She sang a variety of styles, ranging from jazz standards to numbers tinged with Caribbean rhythms. The Suriname-born singer’s smooth delivery was enhanced by rousing improvisations, in particular from violinist and festival founder Hsieh Chi-pin (謝啟彬) and guitarist Fabien Degryse.
Thousands attended the Formoz Rock Festival, which took place at the soon-to-be-closed Taipei Children’s Recreation Center (台北市兒童育樂中心) over the weekend.
On Saturday, a large crowd of 400 or so people jostled in front of the Rock stage to watch festival founder Freddy Lim’s (林昶佐) band, Chthonic (閃靈), whose members donned their usual black leather costumes and face makeup. Lim screeched, yelled, and growled as his band played frantic speed metal riffs, which had the audience headbanging and moshing.
In fine Formoz tradition, there was something for every rock fan: on the Fire stage, garage rock band Rabbit Is Rich (兔子很有錢) held a rousing show. The band members got lost in their songs, which started at a mid-tempo hypnotic beat and ascended into a punk frenzy. Meanwhile, a large crowd gathered at the Wind stage, to see popular alt-rock singer Deserts Chang (張懸) and her band.
One of the evening’s highlights was the Canadian band Caribou, which played a set of atmospheric but driving indie rock instrumentals, accompanied by a light show. The band’s leader and drummer, Daniel Snaith, is a spectacle by himself, perhaps a modern day Keith Moon gone avant-garde. With his drum kit placed at the front of the stage, Snaith’s arms swung wildly as he pounded out the beat.
The festival organizers revised the lineup yesterday as typhoon Fung-wong approached the country.
Shots rang out inside Taipei’s National Theater on Friday night as balaclava-clad extremists stormed the stage and down the aisle, taking the three-quarters full theater hostage. One burly terrorist planted a bomb two seats over from where I was sitting and then sat down with the trigger device in his hand.
Such was the tense spectacle that La Fura dels Baus confronted its audience throughout Boris Godunov, a play by the Spanish theatrical group that fuses the original work by Alexander Pushkin with the story of the Moscow theater hostage crisis when roughly 50 Chechen rebels seized a crowded Moscow theater in October of 2002.
La Fura’s meditation on using violence as a means of grabbing power succeeded in revealing the individual motivations behind the terrorists — though without justifying extremism — and in the process humanized them in a way that the media often fails to portray.
Large projection screens were used to great effect and served as both a background set to the actors on stage as well as to show the action outside the theater — such as government officials trying to decide how to proceed with negotiations or police surrounding the building (presumably filmed earlier in the week).
La Fura’s greatest success, however, was how it made use of the entire theater. Not content to relegate its actors to the stage, the characters were brought out into — and at several points became part of — the audience watching the show. Doing so helped to create a masterpiece of verisimilitude rarely seen at theaters in Taiwan.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
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