The Tsai Jui-yueh Dance Research Institute has been crying for help, as the Taipei City Government has incessantly toyed with the original intent of the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act (文化資產保存法), and is being self-centered.
The contract signed between the city and the Tsai Jui-yueh Dance Research Institute — a Taipei cultural heritage site — is to expire next month. The city government is using a public tender to outsource its cultural heritage properties. However, the dance institute has already sent it a letter with the intent of continuing the lease, saying that the clauses on mutual non-compensation and the equality of signing parties in the act should be observed and implemented.
The largest dispute arises from how the city government goes beyond the original intent of its position regarding the implementation of policy procedures. How does the city intend to maintain objectivity in the tendering process?
The second-largest dispute is how the city government could allow the subjects of its policies to be subjective and maintain the original policy goals of the act.
The third-largest dispute concerns how the city plans to reduce cases of unreasonable policy implementations, which have led to protests by the dance institute and wasted the group’s resources.
The city government is looking at this from a professional bureaucracy standpoint, suppressing the institute’s “cultural objectivity.” It has not reached the point of mutual objectivity.
There are three intrinsic qualities to the institute:
First, it has historical value. The Tsai Jui-yueh Dance Research Institute is an important outlet for research and innovation. It has played a major role as a window into international dance and performance art. It possesses innovative value and distinction in the nation’s history of dance performance.
Second, in terms of artistic value, its dance performances are intangible cultural assets, and the performances that take place on its grounds have invigorated the spirit of the institution.
Third, in terms of historical figure-based cultural value, there are about 20 to 30 former residences of living national treasures in Taipei. They include the residences of politician and economist Li Kwoh-ting (李國鼎), writer and inventor Lin Yu-tang (林語堂), former president Yen Chia-kan (嚴家淦) and martial-law era liberal philosopher and critic Yin Hai-kuang (殷海光). In 1991, the Tsai Jui-yueh Dance Research Institute was the first heritage site to be designated as such for its cultural contributions based on its former proprietors and productions. It could be called the first of such cultural properties.
Most importantly, the site is not just a cultural heritage space. It is a place of cultural dissemination and teaching, and the cradle of Taiwanese dance culture and its cultivation. This space has nurtured more than 4,000 professional dancers who have blossomed and dispersed throughout Taiwan to continue its work, bringing a tangible sense of vitality to the site.
The value of preserving Taiwan’s cultural heritage, monuments and historic sites is also about the conscious methodologies used by Taiwanese intellectuals to intervene and change government policies, to make waves by preventing mistaken policy pedantry from ruining the dance studio, much less leading to its forced disappearance.
Recognizing the “value” of the Tsai Jui-yueh Dance Research Institute’s flesh and blood, sentimentality and memory is far more important than the “cost” of a rebate, return on investment or derivative income streams, is it not?
Knight Chang is a political worker and doctor of education.
Translated by Tim Smith
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