The Paper Windmill Theatre made a splash at a Taiwan Day Carnival in the Hungarian capital of Budapest over the weekend, wowing Hungarian children as well as young refugees from Ukraine.
Paper Windmill Theatre is a performance troupe whose shows are mainly produced for children. It combines the finesse and physical prowess of acrobats with the use of puppetry and modern projected animation.
The troupe on Friday last week put on a special adaptation of the Chinese folk story Nezha Ravages the Sea (哪吒鬧龍宮) by the troupe’s performance director and writer Lee Yung-feng (李永豐).
Photo: CNA
The troupe’s adaptation of the story was specifically tailored to Hungarian audiences using either Hungarian vocabularies or puns, which, with the addition of their mixed-medium performance featuring projected animation and puppets, dazzled the young attendees at the Hungarian Museum of Trade and Tourism.
Humanitarian organizations invited Ukrainian refugee children to watch the show and provided a live Ukrainian translator.
Paper Windmill Theatre director Jen Chien-cheng (任建誠) said he had initially thought the extravagant yet culturally alien costume designs of the Chinese story might scare the young audience, but was surprised by how well the Hungarian and Ukrainian children received the show.
As Nezha is not only a popular protagonist in many Chinese folk stories, but also a deity worshiped in countries with ethnic Chinese populations — Taiwan being one of those nations — the troupe gifted children with Nezha’s amulets made of fabric after the performance, to wish them luck and protection.
Aside from dressing up as their new favorite folk hero, children were given the opportunity to color pictures of Nezha provided by the General Association of Chinese Culture, which partnered with the troupe to make their show in Hungary possible.
The museum also teamed up with the Taipei Representative Office in Budapest to bring additional cultural flair to the Taiwan Day Carnival.
People visiting the carnival were given the opportunity to experience Chinese calligraphy and sample simple Taiwanese delicacies.
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