Whale Island, a musical based on a mythical story written to encourage people to explore Taiwan’s ancient history, premiered yesterday at the National Theater in Taipei and is showing through the weekend.
It was created by music theater company La Cie MaxMind and puppetry group Puppet & Its Double in collaboration with playwright Shih Ju-fang (施如芳).
It is the third part of a trilogy, with the two groups performing in the first two based on a script written and directed by La Cie MaxMind artistic director Lee Yi-hsiu (李易修), whose vision to create “a mythical epic akin to the Book of Mountains and Seas (山海經)” for Taiwan was backed by the National Performing Arts Center, La Cie MaxMind said in a statement on Thursday.
Photo courtesy of the National Theater & Concert Hall
The first part of the trilogy, The Drought Goddess (大神魃), was first staged in 2008, followed by Isle of Dreams (蓬萊) in 2016. They showcase Lee’s efforts to create contemporary theater works that incorporate traditional nanguan (南管) and beiguan (北管) music, the arts center said in 2021 when it picked Whale Island as its headline production for this year.
The staging of Isle of Dreams in 2018 brought Shih and Lee together after Shih saw the show and found a fellow artist creating original works based on the history of Taiwan, La Cie MaxMind said.
“Ancient people created mythological stories to explain natural phenomena that could not be reasonably explained,” Shih said in the statement, citing her previous lack of understanding of Taiwan’s unique geography and rich history as a reason for her decision to write a mythical story about its history.
In Whale Island, Lee and Shih tell the history of Taiwan from the formation of the island 6 million years ago through characters created from geographical elements, such as ocean currents, a volcano and indigenous creatures such as the Formosan salamander, La Cie MaxMind said.
Puppet & Its Double helps deliver the dramatic effects needed for these characters, who are spirits or deities in the story, it said.
The story Shih wrote is set on a fictional island in a postapocalyptic world, with only one human character — Na Na (娜娜), a girl who is “the sole survivor” of an earthquake and the ensuing tsunami and has only a doll, called Boo Boo (咘咘), to keep her company, it said.
The songs were composed by Hsu Shu-hui (許淑慧), who mixed elements of nanguan and beiguan music with contemporary music, to narrate the story about the once beautiful island, it said.
Thereafter, a character called Kuro, the spirit of the Kuroshio current in the western Pacific, emerges and takes on the role of another narrator.
Whale Island has been three years in the making and was picked by the National Performing Arts Center from among 22 proposed projects in 2021 as the program it would nurture, pour resources into and present this year.
The resources include up to NT$10 million (US$326,360) in funding to create a quality Taiwanese production that can be shown on the global stage after a tour of the National Performing Arts Center’s three venues across the nation.
Following the three performances at the National Theater in Taipei, the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts is to host two performances on June 17 and 18. Tickets for the performances are available through the Opentix ticketing service.
Two performances are to be staged at National Taichung Theater on Oct. 21 and 22, with tickets yet to go on sale.
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