After a rather stressful couple of weeks, I found myself really enjoying this Friday night performance of music, dance, and interactive media. While the 2-person (2.5?) show had its ups and downs, the ups were much more frequent, and after hearing the artists speak for a short time about how they create their pieces, I’m excited to see more shows of theirs in the future.

The performance space was rather bare: an electric keyboard, a grand piano, a bare wall for projection, and an open space for the dancer. The musician began playing sparse notes on his keyboard, notes that manifested themselves on the wall as what looked to me like snowflakes. When the dancer came out and began interacting with these “snowflakes” through her shadow (projected on the wall through a Kinect-type system), I finally understood what the Chinese show description meant when it wrote 「三方藝術元素」 (it wasn’t translated to English, but I think it could just be written as “a third artistic element” after dance and music). Depending on the keyboard note, some images came from above, some from below, some were heavy, or large, and some were smaller, or lighter or bouncier…it all depended on what the musician played. As the performance continued, more computerized elements were added to the filter between music and image, and the dancer reacted accordingly.

All in all, the music, the images, and the dance succeeded in conveying a wide variety of emotions that left me, at least, identifying with the pressures as well as the joys that the world sent towards the performers. The performers did a good job of blending the three art forms in interesting ways that were neither self-conscious nor show-offy, and it made me curious to see how they’ll interact with other “third artistic elements” in the future.

I only have two criticisms. One is that while the musician and dancer interacted on stage, they never really visually acknowledged each other. I would have liked to see occasional eye contact between them, because the lack of acknowledgement caused a sense of loneliness that conflicted with the close connection the performers established during the piece, particularly in the beginning. The other is that the dancer’s costume was subtle yet unique, while the musician’s costume looked like he just got out of bed. It was a small thing that we laughed about after, but I thought I’d mention it because the piece really is very visual.

Thank you to Filmadance Environmental Theatre for this contribution to the 2014 Fringe. I’m looking forward to seeing your future shows!

演出場地：雷克雅維克實驗室

The Village is the performance of an original fable, and fables are a curious thing. Fables play with stereotypes and archetypes to tell the story of how humans live. Fables, more than many other types of story, utilize symbols to indicate the complex undercurrents of their seemingly simple structure. They are often stories told easily to children by adults who interpret them through a lens of irony and moralism.

When presented with a fable, I immediately look to the symbols that appear. In “Little Red Riding Hood” we have a young woman covered in red (the color of blood) going into the woods (the world away from home) and encountering a dangerous wolf who lies to her (“wolf” is often used to describe sexually devious men). The story changes in the light of its symbols. So after receiving a very nice program, I entered into the theatre space of The Village, where each audience member had to choose an English name for herself or himself and sit in the forest listening to mellow English-language electronic folk music while waiting for the play to begin. I felt immediately immersed in the symbols of this new world. The characters all wore western-style clothing, ate bagels for food, and spoke in the vernacular of Christian religion, with their “let us pray” “God (上帝 shangdi) help us”. As the symbols piled on, I found myself questioning more and more what this play, is aiming to teach. By the end of the play, I decided that I could make one of two conclusions: either the creators of this play made a fable without thinking too deeply about its symbolism, at which I wonder why they wrote the fable at all, or that they were very aware of the symbols and were making a strong critique of a (western) culture that doesn’t seem to have a strong connection to the actors, audience or community it’s being performed for. I tend to think the former conclusion is the one that applies here.
There’s a saying about how you can tell if a restaurant’s food is good: the less a restaurant cares about its décor, the better the food. Unfortunately, judging from the posters, program and visual marketing of this play, the décor is beautiful.

其它意見：Spend more time thinking about how this story applies to your audience. Create visual symbols that communicate to your audience in their language.
Fables are wonderful in their flexibility, but they also require a lot of applied dramaturgy and analysis to make them effective for the time and location of the place they are being presented.

演出場地：Elsewhere 那裏

Fringe in Taiwan, more than fringe in many of the countries where I’ve seen Fringe shows, seems to be much more about young up-and-coming artists. Tonight’s show, however struck me with its maturity. That is not to say that the cast of two characters, one man and one woman, is old. On the contrary, both actors played students (high school? university?). But it was obvious from their performances that even though they’re not that old in age, their experience has aided them in creating intense and powerful characters on stage.

It also struck me leaving the café after tonight’s performance that as a non-native Chinese speaker, my tools for understanding Mandarin communication contrast in many ways with director Q-Chang’s tools. He relies primarily on sound and spoken word, whereas I’m used to utilizing visual cues to make up for my occasional lack of Mandarin vocabulary. As theatre artists, however, we must rely on both visual and audial cues in balanced measure.

Therefore, especially in the first half of the show when the play’s dialogue seemed to be much more like poetry with tints of Theatre of the Absurd, I had some difficulty jumping with the actors through the different characters, times and spaces they were inhabiting, and I wondered if I was not the only one. The female actor, Yu-Ling Teng, embodied a couple of different characters in her performance, versus the one character her male counterpart Wen-Hao Chang played. As I wrote above, both are skilled actors, and I especially appreciated Teng’s ability to use the expressiveness of her face to mark changes in character and emotion. However, the play would still have been helped with the aid of lighting, costume, or blocking changes that would have given a clearer indication of the plot and characters.

Finally, a note on the topics presented in this piece. One of the keywords under Unbalanced in the Fringe program was gender. My impression of the play’s themes focused not so much on gender and much more on sexuality. As an artistic commentary on the challenges and conflicts young gay men in Taiwan face, the play generally succeeded. The small performance space, in particular, added to the intimacy that is so often needed when presenting issues of sexuality oppression to a mixed audience. As such, for me at least, while the show’s beginning was more difficult to connect with because of its abstract and visually-bare style, the latter half moved me with its rawness, tenderness, and directness.

I enjoyed the piece more as it went along, and thank 68 Theatre for its presentation.

其它意見：The size and intimacy of the performance space is a positive thing for this play. If the play is performed again in the future, remember to try keeping the intimacy that Cafe, Electrician (水電咖啡) naturally provides.

It may also help for the director to have a trusted assistant director to aid in maintaining visual consistency and imagery during the rehearsal process.

The script is both interesting and musical in its rhythm, timing and repetition of lines. Sometimes, however, this can make the play feel longer than it is, and seems to take away from the main goal and themes of the play. Going through the play for more re-edits may help to create more consistency.

演出場地：水電咖啡

Creating a performance for a small space can be challenging and exciting. The play 10x4≠40, with its inventive staging, attempts to create new connections to urban Taiwan life by bringing the audience literally into the action, intermittently inviting them onstage into the show’s Plain Soup Noodles (Yang Chun Mian) shop as customers.

The device works, but as not as well as it could. Some cast members were part of the audience, and so they created conversation with Mr. Chen, the shop’s owner, as well as with other “customers”. Because of this, there were too many conversations happening at the same time, so I felt like I was missing important plot information. Being so close to Mr. Chen, however, created a stronger bond between the audience and his character, particularly because the actor playing Mr. Chen seemed so comfortable chatting up all of his customers, cast and audience alike (well, he didn’t chat me up – but facing the challenge of improvising a conversation with an unknown linguistic entity like me would be daunting for many actors.)

Indeed, Mr. Chen’s performance with the audience was the strong point of the show.

My biggest problem with this play, however, is consistency. The world that T-star theater created in this noodle shop is interesting, but it doesn't follow its own rules. We were given real tea and real snacks to eat, but our noodle bowls were empty and the disposable chopsticks we were given were left unopened. The shop (and show) had a very local Taiwan flavor, but the theme music was western chamber music. Mr. Chen was very relatable to us all, but he also spent much of his time on stage speaking monologues to an unknown subject. Overall, the show seemed unable to keep the focus on expressing its theme of the stories behind urban masks.

This theater company has interesting ideas, now it needs to start doing the work to make those ideas into high-quality and focused performances.

其它意見：T-star theater seems to be made up mostly of college-aged men. They've got spirit and energy, but I suggest that they talk to more mentors that can offer suggestions from life experience for both the story and performance of this piece.

I would have loved to see a woman or two in the cast, particularly since they played an important part in Mr. Chen's story.

Also, some small theatre behaviors, such as not allowing backstage crew to appear to the audience while the show is going on, help to raise the show's quality level quickly and fairly easily. If curtains had been hung above both of the doors, the crew would have been much better hidden, and it would have looked like much more like a small noodle shop.

演出場地：小小幸福