LEE Huey-mei, General and Artistic Director

NTT Fall for Great Souls at 10: Three Acts of Reconstruction—From Text to Sensory Experience

"Ten years of accumulation, a deconstruction and reconstruction of theater."

The National Taichung Theater marks its tenth anniversary this year. Over the past decade, it has charted a path from understanding the classics to boldly reimagining them, and from deep local roots to dialogues that reach across disciplines and cultures. At this significant milestone, we take "Deconstruction and Reconstruction" as the theme of this year's series, presenting eleven extraordinary productions that embody the artistic vision, growth, and momentum cultivated over the past decade.

One thread running through this year's series is the contemporary reimagining of the classics. After a decade of engaging deeply with both Western and traditional repertoires, NTT has gained the confidence to revisit canonical works from fresh perspectives. Mozart's Così fan tutte and Shakespeare-inspired Lost Lear relocate familiar narratives to settings as unexpected as a contemporary recording studio and a nursing home, while Kingdom of Desire and Antigone draw on the expressive languages of Peking Opera and contemporary dance to confront the enduring struggles of the human condition.

Another thread lies in the time-space collage of local history. Over the past decade, NTT and many of Taiwan's leading performing arts companies have evolved together. Today, traditional opera forms are finding renewed resonance and vitality in contemporary performance. The Oolong Tycoon and Phantoms of the Timeworn Mansion break free from linear time, weaving together late Qing-era commercial rivalries, the intellectual currents associated with the Taiwanese Cultural Association, and surreal spectral presences into a reflection on the collective identity of this land.

A final thread looks toward the future of the senses and the body. A decade of exploring the boundaries of theater finds its most striking expression in this year's series. Whether through Robert Lepage's five-hour epic Faith, Money, War and Love, which showcases the artistry of a true master of theatrical illusion; the reunion of bodies and generations in HORSE's twentieth-anniversary production Big Dance; the fragmentation and reassembly of dance and drama in The Great He-Goat; the sonic experiments of NTT Artist-in-Residence Lai Chi-hsia's Reverberation: In Tune; or the enduring resonance of the Austro-German classical tradition through Sir Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, each work invites audiences to reconsider how theater is experienced through the senses and the body.

Every act of deconstruction begins with understanding; every act of reconstruction speaks to the present. This series is not only a reflection of what NTT has achieved over the past decade, but also a note to the future—a reminder of what theater can continue to become.

KENG Yi-wei| Adjunct assistant professor of the School of Theatre Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts

Inheriting Greatness

In the anime Attack on Titan, the power of the Nine Titans can only be passed on when a new Titan consumes the predecessor, inheriting its extraordinary power. Much the same can be said of NTT's Fall for Great Souls series. At first glance, the original classics seem to have been devoured, even erased. Yet what truly endures is their power to transform the world, reborn each time it is inherited and reimagined.

This year's NTT Fall for Great Souls series offers a compelling demonstration of how the classics continue to find new life through dialogue with the present. Shakespeare has long served as a touchstone for contemporary reinterpretation. In his influential Shakespeare Our Contemporary, the Polish critic Jan Kott argued that Shakespeare’s plays continue to illuminate the conditions of modern life.

Irish director Dan Colley's Lost Lear takes an unexpected path, reimagining King Lear through the experience of an elderly woman living with dementia. Through an inventive blend of projection, puppetry, and live video, the production transforms the central father-daughter relationship into one between mother and son, while Shakespeare's profound insight into human nature continues to resonate within the alienation of contemporary life.

Contemporary Legend Theatre's Kingdom of Desire, adapted from Macbeth, was the company's inaugural production and has since become a landmark of intercultural theater. Now, exactly forty years after its 1986 premiere, audiences will not only witness the celebrated partnership of WU Hsing-kuo and WEI Hai-min, but also experience the work as it is carried forward by a new generation through CHU Po-cheng and HUANG Jo-lin, offering two generations of interpretation in a single production.

Innovation in contemporary performing arts rarely emerges in isolation. More often, it finds its inspiration and vitality through an ongoing dialogue with tradition. Norwegian choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen, the first guest choreographer commissioned by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, brings Europe-based Taiwanese dancer WU Meng-ke into Antigone. Rather than faithfully recounting the ancient Greek tragedy, the work reframes it through a multiplicity of viewpoints. As Øyen himself has noted, these perspectives invite audiences to examine "violence against women, violence in general, and the abuse of power."

Meanwhile, Cie Mossoux-Bonté's The Great He-Goat draws inspiration from one of Francisco Goya's Black Paintings. Blending dance, physical theater, and puppetry, the production gives visual form to the violence, frailty, and helplessness concealed within Goya's haunting late masterpiece.

Nowhere is this reinterpretation of the classics more evident than in contemporary opera. Across Europe and North America, every production of a Mozart opera begins with the same score, yet each staging offers its own distinctive reading. In Laurent Pelly's production of Così fan tutte, the stage becomes an opera rehearsal room. Through its play-within-a-play structure, Pelly preserves the work's comic spirit while inviting audiences to reconsider its age-old misogynistic premise in a contemporary context.

Taiwanese opera, by contrast, is rooted in the tradition of huoxi (live, improvisational performance), a scenario-based approach allows performers greater freedom to improvise rather than strictly follow a fixed script. Tang Mei Yun Taiwanese Opera Company's Phantoms of the Timeworn Mansion explores the history of the Taiwan Cultural Association by departing from conventional historical drama, weaving together supernatural suspense and comedy through a ghost story set in a century-old mansion in Tainan. Ming Hwa Yuan Arts & Cultural Group's The Oolong Empire approaches the rise and fall of Dadaocheng's late nineteenth-century tea empire as a story of commercial rivalry, while tracing the competing ambitions of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou immigrants.

Neither production is built upon a canonical literary text, yet both offer richly layered historical perspectives through their imaginative reinterpretation of pivotal moments in Taiwan's past. In this regard, the postmodern historian Hayden White's revelation of the fictional and rhetorical dimensions underlying historical writing helps illuminate what is truly at stake in reinterpreting the classics. The question is not which version is objectively true, but how multiple, even conflicting, interpretations sharpen our capacity for critical judgment.

If one were to single out the most ambitious reconstruction of history, however, it would surely be Faith, Money, War and Love, Robert Lepage's collaboration with Schaubühne Berlin. Often hailed as the "Leonardo da Vinci of contemporary theater," Lepage is renowned for devising work collectively with his performers. Drawing on the four suits of a deck of cards, he constructs four interwoven narratives of faith, money, war, and love, bringing together characters from the aftermath of the Second World War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in Afghanistan, and present-day Ukraine into a five-hour epic tracing the course of modern German history. As always, Lepage's masterful command of multimedia theater allows the stage to transform effortlessly into airports, hotels, and countless other settings, creating an experience of remarkable theatrical virtuosity.

The classics do not endure because they possess some immutable, unchangeable meaning that must remain untouched. Quite the opposite. Their vitality lies in their capacity to invite new, and sometimes opposing, interpretations across different times and cultures. Just as the Laozi has inspired hundreds of commentaries, the Diamond Sutra generations of collected annotations, and Dream of the Red Chamber an entire field of scholarship, so too does theater resist any single definitive way of staging a classic. Every production is a fresh reading, a renewed understanding of the text. However radical a production may initially seem, it ultimately becomes part of the classic's flesh and blood, inheriting and carrying forward its power to transform the world.