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攝影 │唐健哲
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攝影 │唐健哲
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攝影 │唐健哲
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攝影 │唐健哲
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攝影 │唐健哲
White Storyteller
The Party Theater Group
Venue：Experimental Theater of National Theatre & Concert Hall (NTCH)
Comments on the finalist artworks
The performance spoke of a laborer’s life story as he revisited the horror of the White Terror experienced by two generations of his family during the wake for his father. The stage, therefore, was designed as a funeral hall, and the setting was constructed with paper craft, creating a unique texture that was both avant-garde and reminiscent of everyday life. Actor CHIU An-Chen performed with two puppets controlled by puppeteers WU Rong-Chang and HUANG Wu-Shan. In the performance, the actor entered the memory world as he controlled the puppets. The history of the White Terror was interwoven with the reality as the performance was carried out by the actor and the puppets. The puppets sometimes interacted with the leading actor, sometimes played the crucial role that traversed history and strung the clues together. With intricate layers, the work introduced in a profound way the politically oppressed life of a small potato in Taiwan. (Commentator: LIN Tsai-Yun)
About the Artwork
Sharing the stage with puppets, veteran theater worker CHIU An-Chen plays seven characters in the one-man show, White Storyteller. Taiwan’s traumatic Martial Law period serves as a narrative backdrop for this conceptualization of a father-son protagonist pair who had grappled with White Terror. They twist and form their individual life experiences, fears, and desires, as they project their emotions onto the character of Liao Tianding from heroic legends.
The Party Theater Group constructed the stage set for White Storyteller through a special method of artistic collaboration that combined the traditional elements of artistic performance with the new to transform the traditional performance stage of Taiwanese glove puppetry by bringing it to life as a daily object.
White Storyteller is an original theatrical work written by Golden Bell winning playwright ZAN Jae, directed by Taishin Art Award winner TAI Chun-fang, with puppetry performed by Chinese Culture and Arts Award recipient master puppeteer WU Rong-chang and director HUANG Wu-shan of Shan Puppet Theatre. Adding to the paper-binding elements on stage is the East-meets-West paper cutting art of British artist Tim Budden. All combining to reveal a multifaceted stage set that attempts to generate deep interactions and exquisite dialogue between the traditional and the modern, and creates a brand new aesthetic in the process.
About the Artist
The Party Theater Group
Founded in 2001, recent works of The Party Theater Group have utilized real people, puppets, masks, and multimedia, etc., as creative elements. In addition to interpreting classical texts of theater, they have invited arts workers from other countries to engage in projects of international exchange in an effort to expand the arts arena. Their work, The Sky Crisis, was named by the 7th Annual Taishin Arts Award as one of ten major works of the year, and their performances of The Libation Bearers, Agamemnon, I Am My Own Wife have also been nominated for the Taishin Arts Award in their respective years of performance.
