Wednesday’s concert by the National Symphony Orchestra under Gunther Herbig had had its heart torn out before it even started. The young Russian pianist Alex Kobrin, scheduled to play Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D Minor, K.466 — perhaps his most ambitious exercise in the medium — was unable to fit the concert’s revised date into his schedule (it was to have taken place on Sunday afternoon but was moved to Wednesday because of the typhoon). Beethoven’s two violin romances, and another for two violins by Pablo Sarasate, were substituted, giving Taipei the same program Kaohsiung was due to hear the following Saturday [20 Sept.].
The result was an airing of exclusively 19th-century works, all of them extremely well-known. Is this really what the NSO, currently experiencing low ticket sales, really should be offering? Next July’s Carmen will also be something no one will be hearing for the first time, replacing Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, an opera by a composer young Taiwanese instrumentalists I know are often enthusiastic about.
I admit my limited receptivity to these three charming but slight violin works, Wagner’s Meistersinger Prelude and Brahms’ First Symphony was influenced by having spent the earlier part of the day listening to Janacek’s dynamic and highly original opera From the House of the Dead, vital music that has probably never been heard live here in Taiwan.
But I was prompted to wonder, nonetheless, whether this kind of extremely cautious programming was the right fare to offer Taiwan’s generally open-minded, well-educated and well-informed concertgoers. But at least November’s homegrown opera premier, The Black Bearded Bible Man, remains in the NSO program to challenge audiences with the promise of novelty.
U-Theater (優人神鼓) began its performance of The Walk at the National Theater with a short documentary of their 12,000km walk around Taiwan. One memorable shot was of an exhausted walker laying on a children’s slide, his head at the foot and his legs resting on the slope, red cap over his face. Given the quick pace at which was the company traveled, such exhaustion was merited.
The Walk moves for the most part at a much slower pace, but proved to be a very rewarding journey. Though there are some fast-paced segments, the image that lingers is of walkers moving single file, lifting each foot and putting it down ever so slowly, each muscle contraction and release a meditation in itself.
It’s always hard to describe U-Theater to someone who has not seen them. “A Zen drumming group” is the usual definition, but it is so much more. Each of the group’s productions is built around drumming, but company founder and director Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀) started off as an actress and her sense of showmanship helps keep audiences riveted, even during set changes.
Abstract images of the ocean, leaves and forests were projected on the backdrop and a small drop scrim was artfully used both to conceal and to highlight the performers. In section four (晚風紅日), a bright sun blazed on the screen, while the sound of the small drums carried by the performers epitomized the sun beating down on your head on a hot day. The sun was replaced in section five (山谷流泉) with shifting ocean waves of teal blue, turquoise and sky blue, while the incredible voice of Aboriginal singer Inka Mbing helped carry some of the women on their journey, much as Iki Tadaw’s singing began the show.
A few blocks south at the Taipei Guiling Street Avant-Garde Theater on Saturday afternoon there was a journey on a much smaller scale, as Sun Chuo-tai’s (孫梲泰) 8213 Physical Dance Theater (8213肢體舞蹈劇場) explored cross-cultural differences and identity in Boundless: My Bliss (無國界∣我的天堂).
Sun allowed each performer to showcase their talent, even though at other times they were competing for attention — from one another and from the audience, physically and verbally. Mimi Cave’s dialogue on global warming and how practicing yoga and being a vegetarian made her a better person (so why should she have to worry about turning off lights and turning down the air-conditioner?) was spot-on.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
Famed Chinese demographer Yi Fuxian (易富賢) recently wrote for The Diplomat on the effects of a cross-strait war on demography. He contended that one way to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is by putting the demographic issue front and center — last year total births in the PRC, he said, receded to levels not seen since 1762. Yi observes that Taiwan’s current fertility rate is already lower than Ukraine’s — a nation at war that is refusing to send its young into battle — and that its “demographic crisis suggests that Taiwan’s technological importance will rapidly decline, and
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
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