To the almost deafening sounds of 11 taiko drums and a gong, the Department of Corrections yesterday officially launched a unique road show at Taichung Prison that will see the Guwu Percussion Troupe from Changhua Prison tour 19 prisons and detention centers throughout the central and southern parts of the country.
The tour actually began on Thursday at a smaller detention facility in Taichung, but only the third-floor auditorium at the Taichung Prison was deemed big enough to hold 200 inmates and about 25 dignitaries and members of the media for an hour-and-a-half-long formal ceremony, including Minister of Justice Tseng Yung-fu (曾勇夫), Department of Corrections Director Wu Hsien-chang (吳憲璋), Changhua Prison Warden Tai Shou-nan (戴壽南) and U-Theatre founder and artistic director Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀).
The troupe will give six performances next month, with the remainder of the shows scheduled for November. Liu, whose company members organized and taught the drumming and sacred dance classes at Changhua Prison, said it took about six months of coordination within the Department of Corrections and the various prisons and centers to arrange the tour.
Photo: Yang Cheng-chun, Taipei Times
For security reasons, only 12 members at a time from the 20-plus inmate troupe will be allowed out of the Changhua facility for the performances, and they are tightly guarded and manacled for the trips to and from the prison.
While the members wear U-Theatre’s distinctive sarong pants to perform in, they also wear white eye masks to protect their identities.
U-Theatre began offering the drumming classes in 2009 as part of Chuanghua Prison’s unique reform-through-art program, which includes several traditional music ensembles, as well as a puppetry group and dance classes.
While this year’s prison tour is not the first time that members of the Guwu Percussion Troupe have been allowed outside the Changhua facility to perform, a tour on this scale has never been tried before.
Joining the inmates on the tour are two former members of the Changhua troupe who were paroled last fall and have since become members of U-Theatre, performing with the company at the Taipei International Flora Expo earlier this year.
In their speeches at the end of the show they described how their lives had been transformed by the dedication and discipline required to learn U-Theatre’s zen-based drumming and meditation practices — messages the Department of Corrections officials hope will rub off on the audience.
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
A relatively large earthquake may strike within the next two weeks, following a magnitude 5.2 temblor that shook Taitung County this morning, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. An earthquake struck at 8:18am today 10.2km west of Taitung County Hall in Taitung City at a relatively shallow depth of 6.5km, CWA data showed. The largest intensity of 4 was felt in Taitung and Pingtung counties, which received an alert notice, while areas north of Taichung did not feel any shaking, the CWA said. The earthquake was the result of the collision between the Philippine Plate and the Eurasian Plate, the agency said, adding
Snow fell in the mountainous areas of northern, central and eastern Taiwan in the early hours of yesterday, as cold air currents moved south. In the northern municipality of Taoyuan, snow started falling at about 6am in Fusing District (復興), district head Su Tso-hsi (蘇佐璽) said. By 10am, Lalashan National Forest Recreation Area, as well as Hualing (華陵), Sanguang (三光) and Gaoyi (高義) boroughs had seen snowfall, Su said. In central Taiwan, Shei-Pa National Park in Miaoli County and Hehuanshan National Forest Recreation Area in Nantou County saw snowfall of 5cm and 6cm respectively, by 10am, staff at the parks said. It began snowing
The 2025 Kaohsiung Wonderland–Winter Amusement Park event has teamed up with the Japanese manga series Chiikawa this year for its opening at Love River Bay yesterday, attracting more than 10,000 visitors, the city government said. Following the success of the “2024 Kaohsiung Wonderland” collaboration with a giant inflatable yellow duck installation designed by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, this year the Kaohsiung Tourism Bureau collaborated with Chiikawa by Japanese illustrator Nagano to present two giant inflatable characters. Two inflatable floats — the main character, Chiikwa, a white bear-like creature with round ears, and Hachiware, a white cat with a blue-tipped tail
RSS