Siraya Pai | NTT Observer, Theatre Critic
Craft and Contemporaneity:
Imagining Theatre Beyond Its Known Possibilties
For many who frequent the National Taichung Theater, last year's performances still linger vividly in memory—whether it was the legendary flamenco icon Israel Galván transforming his lifelong artistry into a nimble and expressive language of hands and feet, his body moving with effortless rhythm as he reimagined La Consagración de la Primavera (The Rite of Spring) alongside two pianos; or Schaubühne Berlin channeling 19th-century Ibsen to confront the moral crises of modern civilization in An Enemy of the People, blurring the lines between theatrical fiction and urgent reality. To distill the classics, to push the boundaries, and to anchor it all in the exquisite mastery of stagecraft—this is the spirit of the annual “NTT Fall for Great Souls” series, where the enduring traditions of theater meet the ever-shifting tides of our times.
Jean-Baptiste Racine, the 17th-century French playwright known for his adaptations of Greek and Roman tragedies, explored the foundations of Western cultural history through the lens of religion and human nature. His approach, though profound, was often met with criticism by his contemporaries. Three centuries later, Racine's Bérénice finds new expression in the hands of the radical director Romeo Castellucci. The story of the Palestinian queen’s political and romantic entanglements is brought into sharp focus through the commanding stage presence of French cinema icon Isabelle Huppert. Sound and speech are intricately woven to evoke a sense of total theater, turning the stage into a space where scenes and characters drift like specters, in layered dialogue with the classical text and its traditional narrative form.
Two of Taiwan's leading performing arts companies, GuoGuang Opera Company and Legend Lin Dance Theatre, mark their 30-year milestones with two signature works that embody the core aesthetics of their respective visions: Dreaming of the Red Chamber—Qianlong and Heshen and The Eternal Tides. The former, the final installment in GuoGuang's Qing Court Trilogy, reunites acclaimed TANG Wen-hua and WEN Yu-hang on stage, tracing the rise and fall of an era through the lens of human desire. The latter, created by choreographer LIN Lee-chen following her trilogy of tribute to Heaven, Earth, and Man, is a distillation of over three decades of artistic exploration. In The Eternal Tides, the dancers move with quiet resolve and ritualistic grace, their serene and fluid gestures subtly revealing an undercurrent of violence lurking beneath the surface of civilization.
Verdi's Rigoletto, produced by Opera Australia, has captivated audiences around the world since its debut in 1991. Reimagined as a Fellini-style Italian gangster film, this production transforms the grandeur of a 16th-century European court into a bold, cinematic vision. After all, a pure-hearted young woman falling for a charming but manipulative nobleman and triggering a cascade of consequences is a tale that never feels out of place, no matter the era or setting. What was once a story of revenge and entangled passions is now further enriched with the cinematic visual language of Italian neorealism, revealing the theater's rich capacity to move fluidly between forms and mediums.
In his latest work ALL EARS, Cloud Gate’s CHENG Tsung-lung sets out to “choreograph for sound.” CHENG's past creations have always been infused with vivid and distinctive sonic imagery—sounds that can, in an instant, transport the audience to the bustling streets of Bangka or to the quiet mountains where one seems to converse with all living things. This time, CHENG and his team shape the theater space itself into a shifting soundscape, calling forth the dancers' bodies to respond as instruments of movement.
Two unmissable works push the boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and dream: The making of Berlin by Belgian documentary theater collective BERLIN, and A Conversation with the Sun (VR) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Each production combines live performance with its own multimedia approach. BERLIN integrates film, while Weerasethakul works with film and virtual reality, both exploring the porous space between presence and imagination.
The making of Berlin offers a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the so-called “Berlin Project.” In the final days of World War II, the Berliner Philharmoniker planned a farewell performance of Siegfried's Funeral March from Wagner's Götterdämmerung, intended to be broadcast live by the German state radio. To evade Allied bombing, the orchestra was divided into seven groups, each rehearsing in a separate bunker. The ambitious plan was ultimately abandoned due to a technical failure. Decades later, the Berliner Philharmoniker's former stage manager approached the theater collective BERLIN in the hope of finally realizing the performance that never came to be.
Though the piece centers on classical music, its soundscape defies expectations. The score features electronic pulses, static noise, and the lone wail of a French horn, casting a faint shadow of unease. Through the interplay of film and live performance, the audience is drawn into a recursive loop—of documenting fact, staging that documentation, and documenting the staging itself. BERLIN's layered construction not only blurs the line between truth and invention but also gestures toward deeper questions: the wounds of war, the complicity of orchestras as instruments of propaganda, and whether art can ever exist apart from the world's brutal realities, or whether it is precisely within illusion that truth reveals itself.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose works have been shown and performed in Taiwan on numerous occasions, presents A Conversation with the Sun as a commission for the 2022 Aichi Triennale. Blending virtual reality with video projection, the piece unfolds in a landscape of shifting light and shadow, accompanied by a poetic score composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. Audience members, whether watching projected footage or wearing VR headsets, occupy the same physical space. The interplay of digital imagery and projected light leads them into a dreamlike world of glowing orbs, caves, stone figures, and barren rockscapes.
As in many of Apichatpong's works, memory is filtered through layers of folklore and primordial forest, carrying with it an undercurrent of political meaning that resists easy articulation. In A Conversation with the Sun, the audience's individual perceptions and shared experience create the sensation of drifting through one another's dreams. In that shared dreamspace, a kind of collective memory begins to take shape.
Sometimes, theater needs no elaborate technology. A single pair of hands can conjure an entire world. Kiss & Cry, created by the Belgian company Astragales, is a live cinematic performance where hands take on human form. Through the camera's close-up lens, fingers transform into a graceful woman, navigating landscapes of sand, dollhouses, and miniature furniture. Natural effects are created with simple means, such as a hairdryer simulating wind. What unfolds is a series of quiet farewells and fleeting losses, told through a language that merges mime, sign, and a contemporary dance sensibility where every gesture channels intention down to the fingertips.
When speaking of the artistry of the hand, one cannot overlook Taiwan's traditional glove puppetry. This year, Jin Kwei Lo Puppetry Company presents Blood Brothers, a powerful work that premiered at the 2023 Taiwan Traditional Theatre Festival. The Chinese title, 《壵》, is an ancient form of the character for “strength” (壯), composed of three “士” (shì), signifying the coming together of three virtuous men. The story draws from the legendary tale of Zuo and Yang, sworn brothers bound by loyalty and fate, and from the tragic figure of Jing Ke, chivalrous assassin of the King of Qin. Through their intertwined paths of sacrifice and resistance, the performance invites reflection on what it means to be a hero.
In Blood Brothers, the company fuses glove puppetry with Nanguan music and shadow theater, while also reimagining the spatial boundaries of traditional puppetry. No longer confined to a small proscenium stage, the puppets roam freely through a world shaped by flowing cloth and layered dimensions. Characters appear and disappear between the realms of the living and the dead, embarking on a journey of moral reckoning and self-discovery.
The Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Company returns with The Tide in Her Dream, featuring Tang Mei Yun in the role of pirate queen Tsai Khian Ma. The production takes audiences on a wild and exhilarating journey through a universe that runs alongside the tides of history. As for the classical music that remains a staple of the “NTT Fall for Great Souls” series, this year features conductor Daniel Harding leading the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, joined by Korean piano virtuoso Yunchan Lim. Internationally renowned pianist Meng-Chieh LIU also returns with two piano recitals featuring rich and varied programs, offering a tribute to the first ten brilliant years of the National Taichung Theater.
A quarter into the twenty-first century, why do we still need theater? It is through these boundary-breaking stage works that theater continues to transcend itself and reshape what we imagine it can be.
