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Art Can Change Lives! The 2016 Taipei Arts Festival (TAIPEI QUARTERLY 2016 AUTUMN Vol.05)

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Post date:2016-09-10

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Art Can Change Lives!
The 2016 Taipei Arts Festival
Article _ Xie Yingjie
Photos _ Dark Eyes Performance Lab, Tjimur Dance Theatre, Black Grace Dance Company

“Art cannot be eaten as bread, but art can make bread even more delicious!” These are the words of Keng Yi-Wei (耿一偉), artistic director for the Taipei Arts Festival (台北藝術節). Bringing art into everyday life can lead to new sensory experiences, and change the way people look at the world.
At the 2016 Taipei Arts Festival – now in its 18th year – the curatorial concept is “Art Can Change Lives” (藝術改變你的生活). The invited international and local art creators utilize theatre, music, dance, new circus arts, cross talk (traditional Chinese comic dialogue), documentary theatre, and other forms. A total of 11 splendid and inspiring works are being presented, bringing art of differing character into your life.
TAIPEI AUTUMN 2016 Vol.05 Art Can Change Lives!  The 2016 Taipei Arts Festival
▲ Taiwan’s Tjimur Dance Theatre and New Zealand’s Black Grace Dance Company have co-created 2 Gather, exploring the traditions and contemporary spirit of the two countries’ indigenous peoples. (Photo: Tjimur Dance Theatre, Black Grace Dance Company)
 
Axis Taipei & International Collaboration
Keng believes that the arts festival must reflect the character of the city, and that what defines Taipei is its youth, creativity, and diversity. “What is most special this year is the addition of sexual minority, indigenous, and Hakka elements,” he says. Behind this is a desire for creation of a new atmosphere and fresh programs, and to use this opportunity to facilitate cross-border collaboration, making Taipei a creative core and assisting artist development.
In recent years, the organizers have sought to integrate the Taipei Arts Festival with other arts festivals around the globe, utilizing an “international collaboration” model. The latest topics and works in the international art market are presented. God Bless Baseball (棒球奇蹟), a Taiwan/ Japan/South Korea co-production with Japan’s Okada Toshiki as director, highlights the interdependencies and contradictions between Major League Baseball in the U.S. and professional baseball in Japan and Korea. Taiwan’s The Party Theatre Group (同黨劇團) and France’s Cie du Veilleur are cooperating in Europe Connexion (歐洲聯結), in which power machinations in the European Parliament are seen through the eyes of an ambitious conference assistant who becomes a powerful lobbyist. 2 Gather (在一起) is a collaborative production by Taiwan’s Tjimur Dance Theatre (蒂摩爾古薪舞集) and New Zealand’s Black Grace Dance Company exploring the traditions and contemporary spirit of the two countries’ indigenous peoples.

Circus Arts, High School Girls & A Window on the World
The popular “Circus” (馬戲) category in the Taipei Arts festival’s program has continued this year. The British troupe Gandini Juggling first appeared at the festival in 2014, to much acclaim; this year, in 4X4: Ephemeral Architectures the company blends precision juggling with ballet’s grace and elegance. FOCA Formosa Circus Art (FOCA 福爾摩沙馬戲團) is cooperating with director Baboo for the first time ever in How Long Is Now? ( 一瞬之光), deconstructing circus arts and acrobatic skills with comics and animation to create a sense of wonder and illusion. Taiwan’s Riverbed Theatre (河床劇團) has crafted the new theatrical work Still Life (停格停格) in collaboration with the students of Taipei Municipal Zhongshan Girls High School (中山女高), looking at the city through their eyes. Threetime winner of the Ubu Prize, Italy’s highest theatre-world honor, the Motus Theatre Company is presenting MDLSX, a one-person performance by Silvia Calderoni in which, utilizing her life story of gender blending as starting point, modern society’s cognition and framing in regard to gender are subverted.
La Mélancolie des Dragons, directed by French visual artist Philippine Quesne, is a Moliere Award nominee. In this work, a lyrical snowy landscape is brought to the stage, and a heavy metal amusement park constructed. In Common Ground, directed by Israeli Yael Ronen, seven postwar second-generation immigrants travel back to a now-dissolved Yugoslavia in search of common memories. Keng says that, “The process of theater takes the enmity caused by war and race and fosters compromise and reconciliation, and transforms the life experience of the performers.”
TAIPEI AUTUMN 2016 Vol.05 Art Can Change Lives!  The 2016 Taipei Arts Festival
▲  In Bananaiana, a magical time-travel drama, the protagonist is a Qing Dynasty- era reformist poet named Huang Zun-Xian. (Photo: Dark Eyes Performance Lab)

Fantasy Time Travel & A Shakespearean Classic
Taiwan theater director Hung Hung (鴻鴻) has joined hands with Golden Melody Award-winning singer Huang Lien-Yu (Ayugo Huang; 黃連煜) to create Bananaiana (我是東西南北香蕉人). The protagonist in this work is a real-life character named Huang Zun-Xian (黃遵憲), who was a reformist poet at the end of the Qing Dynasty. Poetry, song, rock music, puppetry, and other elements are fused in this fantasy time-travel drama. In Keng’s words, “Among ‘traditional’ characters, for that era Huang was an avant-garde individual. Take him and place him in the Taipei of today for a look at the world, with people from north, south, east, and west and the references to diversification and internationalization – this is all truly symbolic of this city!” This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
Echoing the tributes to him being staged around the world, the Taipei Arts Festival will feature a cross-talk performance and film screening. Taiwan’s Comedians Workshop (相聲 瓦舍) is presenting a collage work of selections from the playwright’s classics along with newly created repertoire. It is being staged free of charge on October 7th in the amphitheater at Daan Park (大安森林公園). The theatrical documentary film Maxine Peake as Hamlet is being screened at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Zhong Zheng Auditorium (中正紀 念堂演藝廳) on September 13th. Actress Maxine Peake, also seen in the film The Theory of Everything, is cast in the title role.
Keng states that the hope is for the Taipei Arts Festival to serve as a window, enabling audiences to feel and see the larger world with deeper acuity, while at the same time spreading the event’s festive atmosphere throughout the city!

Taipei Arts Festival
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