Digital technology has become as much a part of the world of visual art as traditional tools such as paint and canvas. It isn’t surprising, then, that performance art professionals would call on digital artists to supplement their work on the stage. The 2009 Taiwan International Festival conceived of this year’s event to celebrate the collaboration between the older mediums with new media.
The festival begins Friday next week in the plaza between Taipei City’s National Theater and National Concert Hall with a series of performances timed to celebrate the completion of renovations on the two iconic buildings. It runs until April.
The theme for this year is Vision of the Future, and the 16 Taiwanese and international performances of dance, theater and music were chosen because they fuse traditional stage elements with the latest in media technology.
Canadian theater company lemieux.pilon 4d art uses virtual technology in Norman, a work that examines the life of animator Norman McLaren. Led by multidisciplinary artists Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon, it combines film, music and animation in a production that sees a single actor interacting with projected images.
Multimedia artist Klaus Obermaier applies similar visual elements in Le Sacre du Printemps, a co-production with the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO). In front of the orchestra, a small stage serves as a platform on which a dancer performs while cameras and electronic devices project the figure’s virtual image on to large screens.
Italian theater company Compagnia T.P.O. combines dance, visual art, mechanical installation and stunning lighting effects in The Japanese Garden, an interactive children’s performance
that will randomly select audience members to participate in a work that transforms their dance steps into poetic audio-visual language.
Another family-oriented performance is the The Mice War. NSO resident composer David Chesky
uses Latin, jazz, hip-hop, funk and
classical music to meditate on the absurdity of war in a collaboration with Shiny Shoes Children’s Theater (鞋子兒童實驗劇團).
Festival organizers also invited some of the most innovative directors and composers working in theater today. Experimental theater director and designer Robert Wilson applies his minimalist aesthetic to Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness novel Orlando, which sees its much-anticipated Taiwan premiere next Saturday (see review in next Friday’s Taipei Times). Beijing opera diva Wei Hai-ming (魏海敏) interprets both male and female roles in the solo performance.
Academy Award-winning composer Philip Glass adapts the poems and paintings of Leonard Cohen into music in Book of Longing (to be reviewed in the March 6 edition of the Taipei Times), an artistic feast that features four singers and a live band mingling among projected images of Cohen’s illustrations.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,