Sometimes the best birthday parties are the ones you throw yourself.
Taipei-based Riverbed Theatre (河床劇團) is celebrating its 20th anniversary, with a gallery exhibition at the Eslite Bookstore in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義), which opened earlier this month, and three days of a new production, Dream Makers: Subconscious Theatre — Riverbed Theatre’s 20th Anniversary (造夢者:潛意識劇場—河床劇團20年), next weekend.
The company’s image-based, “Total Theater” productions, more than 40 in all, have blurred the boundaries between visual and performing arts, creating productions largely unhindered by text or even linear narrative.
Photo courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
Some shows have been inspired by the lives and/or works of famed artists from a variety of fields (Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, US theater director Robert Wilson, US film director David Lynch, Albert Einstein, Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama) and events such as the Apollo 11 mission or Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Others have sprung from the fertile, perhaps even fevered, dreams of artistic director Craig Quintero and his colleagues.
Riverbed’s painterly designs, sets featuring multiple hidden doors and exits, and its surreal imagery envelope audiences in dreamscapes that are filled with familiar objects yet often prove otherworldly, if not disturbing.
The troupe has developed a reputation for quality over quantity, preferring smaller venues such as the Taipei Artist Village and National Experimental Theater, or specially built environments for audiences ranging from two dozen to just one person, as with its “Just For You” productions set in hotel rooms and museums in Taipei and Tainan. It has also taken its shows on the road to festivals in Asia and Europe, such as the OFF d’Avignon.
Photo courtesy of Riverbed Theatre
The troupe staged its first show, Burnt Rice, at the Dunhua Eslite Art Space in 1998, so it is fitting it has returned to an Eslite outlet for its birthday celebration.
The “Dream Makers” exhibition is two-fold. While it features paintings, sculptures and video works by troupe members and collaborators, including Quinterro, Carl Johnson, Joyce Ho (何采柔), Su Hui-yu (蘇匯宇), Hsu Yin-ling (許尹齡), Hung Hung (鴻鴻) and Hsia Yu (夏宇), it is also a workshop where the set and props for next week’s shows are being built and painted.
The public is encouraged to participate in the set building process.
As for the show itself, the company says Dream Makers is “a performative meditation on the beauty and sorrow of living, on the fragile impermanence of life.”
“We are fascinated by our body, by the familiar yet strange vehicle that we inhabit. It is us, but at the same time it shifts and changes in ways beyond our control,” it says.
While that sounds maddeningly vague, it perfectly encapsulates Riverbed. The company’s shows have always been difficult to describe in advance, because they are made to be seen and experienced on an individual, not collective level.
While the shows can tap a shared subconsious in the form of cultural, social or visual references, each audience member sees and filters a Riverbed production through their own conciousness and imagination.
Twenty years is an admirable achievement, and Riverbed is a company certainly worth celebrating — whether by wielding a paintbrush or buying a ticket to next weekend’s shows.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and