Compagnie Philippe Genty’s productions are the stuff that dreams are made of. And nightmares, especially the Freudian kind.
They combine puppetry, dance, optical illusions and mime to explore the unconscious and conscious worlds.
In La Fin des Terres (Land’s End), which opened at the National Theater last night, there are surrealistic landscapes, giant puppets with plastic baby faces, huge penises, a pair of legs that become scissor blades, a praying mantis with a human face, huge plastic bubbles that float like jellyfish, a King Kong-sized hand, several trap doors and lots of men in trench coats and fedoras.
The imagery comes from the mind of 71-year-old French artist/puppeteer/director Philippe Genty, in collaboration with his choreographer and wife Mary Underwood.
Genty trained to be a graphic designer, but got involved with puppetry because he found it easier to communicate through puppets than face-to-face. In 1961, he parlayed a grant from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to make a film about puppet troupes into a four-year-long globetrotting journey that allowed him to stage his own puppet shows. In 1968, he started the company, and Underwood, a classically trained dancer, was one of its original members.
While Genty no longer travels with his troupe, his productions still traverse the world. The company was last in Taiwan 16 years ago and was supposed to return in 1999, but the September earthquake that year scuppered the visit.
La Fin des Terres, which premiered in 2004, centers on a couple who meet because of a letter. Their meeting, parting and search for one another are played out in parallel tracks, one “real” and one “dream.”
As with other Genty works, there is no narrative flow to the 90-minute long La Fin des Terres; people, images and fantastic creatures appear and disappear like they do when we dream. Just as dreams allow our minds to fantasize and our most elemental fears to surface, Genty has a knack of creating scenes of unbelievable beauty as well as ones that can make his audiences squirm.
A sequence with scissor blades is guaranteed to leave most men feeling uncomfortable, while a human-faced bug — who dances a delicate, exquisite pas de deux with a young woman before wrapping her up in a web — is sure to give at least some female audience members nightmares.
The sexual imagery and references have led to the production being slapped with a “not suitable for children” label in several countries. The Compagnie Philippe Genty’s seven actors may excel at interacting with huge puppets, but this is no Muppets show.
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
The Taipei Times reported last week that housing transactions fell 15.3 percent last month, to under 20,000 units. However, the market boomed for the first eight months of the year, and observers expect it to show growth for the year as a whole. The fall was due to Central Bank intervention. “The negative impact of credit controls grew evident for the third straight month,” said Sinyi Realty Inc (信義房屋) research manager Tseng Ching-ter (曾敬德), according to the report. Central Bank Governor Yang Chin-long (楊金龍) in October said that the Central Bank implemented selective credit controls in September to cool the housing
These days, CJ Chen (陳崇仁) can be found driving a taxi in and around Hualien. As a way to earn a living, it’s not his first choice. He’d rather be taking tourists to the region’s attractions, but after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the region on April 3, demand for driver-guides collapsed. In the eight months since the quake, the number of overseas tourists visiting Hualien has declined by “at least 90 percent, because most of them come for Taroko Gorge, not for the east coast or the East Longitudinal Valley,” he says. Chen estimates the drop in domestic sightseers after the
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
RSS