Webinars

Following the establishment of the National Performing Arts Center in 2014, The National Theater and Concert Hall (NTCH, 1987), National Taichung Theater (NTT, 2016) and National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying, 2018) have all been incorporated into a parallel mission to develop productions, provide both professional services and aesthetic education, and guide the development of regional arts. By doing so, they engender a healthy creative competition while also stimulating their own local art markets. Due to its location not far from Taipei, the NTT has established a distinct identity via outstanding outreach programmes and international connections of its own. Chiayi Performing Arts Center is Taiwan’s only arts and cultural park with performance, education, exhibition, leisure and other functions. And in Edinburgh there is Dance Base, Scotland’s purpose-built national dance centre. Representatives from these unique venues will discuss the contributions they make to national and international cultural vitality.

This session engages with curatorial practice in Taiwan and Scotland while also delineating various creative practices, such as improvisation. The session will also showcase the performance ‘Intermezzo,’ a dream-like hymn for the body in everyday life presented in musical chapters based on the intermezzo. The social meaning its three actors convey is inherent in the history and condition of individual bodies impacted by cerebral palsy, polio, visual impairment and a traffic accident. Their collective stage presence welds together several ‘body stories,’ the structural base of which is a field of computerised music and on-site piano improvisation subtly enhanced by contrasting lighting. The performers were encouraged to use their imaginations to jump out of daily conventions and restraints, inventing new stage aesthetics while coming to terms with old hindrances. The key to rewriting their stories of the body was to re-activate their core movements and reveal, on stage, the truths of their lives.

During the past decade the practice of live art and performance in Taiwan has increasingly been presented within the realm of museums and similar public arenas. In this expanded and intersectional context, artists have performed the body as object, instrument and archive to challenge ideas around performance-based exhibition. This conversation will bring together the sound artist Chi-Wei Lin, dance artist Fangas Nayaw and a performance artist River Lin, each presenting their case as a point of departure to investigate the relationship between social engagement and live art, the notion of performing archives and identities and the creative process of accommodating live works in gallery settings.

The rise of Taiwanese self-consciousness and indigenous social movement in the 1980s attempted to reverse the single identity of Chinese culture. Indigenous peoples began to reconstruct lost traditions as well as earn respect by participating in politics, literature and the visual and performing arts. Despite these advances, the definition of Taiwanese contemporary indigenous art was shaped and illustrated by museums, galleries and relevant art intuitions. For Indigenous artists invited to display in these institutions, was that a moment of recognition or an added restriction? This session will focus on indigenous curatorial process and methods of dealing with tradition and art, taking Pulima Art Festival as an example. Additionally, artists and curators from both Taiwan and Australia will share experiences of presenting indigenous art in mainstream or other contexts and insights into collaboration and cultural exchange.