La Boite (The Box), the second performance in the Taipei Art Festival (台北藝術節) opened Friday at the Zhongshan Hall (台北市中山堂) in Taipei. The show, a collaboration between Taiwan’s Taiyuan Puppet Theater Company (台原偶戲團) and Compagnie des Zonzons from France, played to an almost full house
The story of two puppet troupes who meet, learn from each other, and then continue on their separate ways was inconsequential, but in the manner of great road movies, it is the journey of the spirit rather that really matters. La Boite achieves this spiritual journey through the strength of its ensemble performance. The close relationship between actors, the puppets, the musicians and even the lighting technicians (the use of projection and shadow was integral to the production), and which they presented so joyfully to the audience, was one of the great achievements of this production.
The fact that the story, such as it was, was self-reflecting — two puppet troupes performing a play about two puppet troupes — lent the production a wonderful intimacy, and the little moments of humor and sentimentality worked well, nicely balanced between sincere sentimentality and the artificial setup of the great “puppet box” in and around which the actors and puppets performed.
The production overcame the problem of the small size of traditional Taiwan glove puppets through the use of projections. The overlaying of the projection on the same space as the actual performance worked particularly well, and was much less distracting than having separate video screens.
Taiyuan has often made use of hand puppets in its experimental performances, but this reviewer has always found the discrepancy in scale too extreme even in small venues such as the Experimental Theater to be truly effective. At a venue such as Zhongshan Hall, this discrepancy could have been disastrous — instead, through this clever use of projection, the intricately made puppets where able to project their presence across the much bigger space, without losing the immediacy of the live performance.
There was much more in La Boite than you’d expect, and all was very neatly combined. It did not have a big finale, which perhaps left some of the audience a little bemused, but even this seemed to fit with the whole program. After all, you often never really know when a journey has ended and another begins.
Allen Yu (余能盛) looked very happy on Saturday night, even before the curtain went up before a full house on his production of La Dame aux Camelias. He was right to be happy, for the production was a huge advance, both in scale and performance levels, over his shows the past two summers.
Dancing to a live orchestra clearly inspired local dancers Ho Yu-wen (何郁玟) as Nanina, Liao Yi-hsuan (廖奕琁) as Prudence Duvernoy, Wang Kuo-nien (王國年) as the Joker and Chuang Yuan-ting (莊媛婷) as the Queen of Cards to dance their best. They must have also been inspired by working for several weeks with their two Czech leads, Nikola Marova and Michal Stipa. The pair’s two big pas de duex, at the end of Act I and Act III, were both passionate and technically demanding.
Yu’s decision to stage Act III’s casino scene with the company costumed as suites of cards was very clever. I loved the bright unitard costumes, though I could have done without the feathers in the little caps. It was a scene that demanded a lot from the entire corp and they pulled it off,
The National Theater saved the best for last in its New Productions of Emerging Taiwanese Choreographers production, as the final two pieces of the program outshone the rest.
All eight dances varied so widely in terms of content and style that it was like ranking apples and oranges to compare them, but Su Shih-jian’s (蘇詩堅) The Wind Blew — beautifully performed by Chou Meng-ping (周夢蘋) — and Huang Huai-de’s (黃懷德) A House Male — danced by Huang, Liu Hou-chen (劉厚辰) and Chen Wei-sheng (陳韋勝) — stood out strongly both in terms of concept and execution.
Huang’s piece especially — a wonderful romp on, around and over a pair of moveable ballet barres — marks the arrival of a strong new voice and was just a sheer joy to watch. More the pity then that the second weekend did not draw as many viewers as the first, at least as far as the Saturday matinees went.
March 10 to March 16 Although it failed to become popular, March of the Black Cats (烏貓進行曲) was the first Taiwanese record to have “pop song” printed on the label. Released in March 1929 under Eagle Records, a subsidiary of the Japanese-owned Columbia Records, the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) lyrics followed the traditional seven characters per verse of Taiwanese opera, but the instrumentation was Western, performed by Eagle’s in-house orchestra. The singer was entertainer Chiu-chan (秋蟾). In fact, a cover of a Xiamen folk song by Chiu-chan released around the same time, Plum Widow Missing Her Husband (雪梅思君), enjoyed more
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