雲門舞集 – 水月

An excerpt of a performance by the Cloud Gate dance company from Taiwan, founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-min, of one of Lin’s most famous pieces, Moon Water. Video requires Quicktime 7.

This week Cloud Gate are performing Moon Water in London at Sadler’s Wells. The whole work is set to Bach’s suites for solo cello and makes complex references to a number of movement styles, but especially tai chi and qi gong. At the end of the piece, the stage is flooded with water, which reflects the dancers’ bodies and movements. It’s amazing.

Reviews are here:

The left-wing Guardian

The right-wing, Murdoch-owned Times

The even more left-wing Independent

The right-wing Conservative Party favourite, Daily Telegraph

Democracy

A montage of video from the January 2008 Legislative elections in Taiwan. Video requires Quicktime 7.    

Last month a group of us from Europe were in Taiwan for the legislative elections. The dramatic wins by the opposition KMT stunned the Democratic Progressive Party, but for reasons that have been widely canvassed, the results leave the presidential election in March open and uncertain. The video has footage from the DPP rally in Longshan, then the KMT rally in Sanchong, with both events occasionally bordering on the comic, then at a school in southern Taipei of actual vote counting. At that point, they were counting the two referenda held simultaneously with the legislature vote. Overall, the mood in Taiwan is depressed and negative, with deep dissatisfaction towards both sides of politics from the electorate and profound mistrust and animosity between the two main parties. Yet, to watch the practice of democracy in a classroom with the volunteer vote counters, who were local teachers, was rather moving.

Cheerleaders with guns

Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School Honour Guard and Drum Corps performing at this year’s Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Video requires Quicktime 7.               

The Edinburgh Military Tattoo began in 1950 as a kind of last hurrah for Empire, rebranded after WWII as the British Commonwealth. Nowadays it seems a curious spectacle, ripe for “reading”, if one is so inclined, the violent history of British colonialism and its cheerful reimagining as colourful nostalgia. It’s hardly a small event, though, with more than two hundred thousand tickets selling out in January for the three weeks of performances in August each year, and it is surely the world’s number one showcase for all things marching. So hats off to the Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School for their invitation to perform. It would be really interesting to know the history of their performance styles, as they look like a rather riotous amalgam of Japanese imperial, Chinese republican, and US military/high school culture. And whatever one thinks of the KMT (e.g. not a lot), it’s very nice, too, to see the flag of the Republic on display on their shoulders at an international event.

Research Fellowship in Oakland Studies

Last Friday, on the way to UC Santa Cruz for the North American Taiwan Studies Association conference, I stopped in Oakland, California to stay with an old friend I knew from Taiwan in the 1990s. On Saturday, I began a new career as a researcher in Oakland Studies.

I went to a “ball game”. The Oakland Athletics baseball team were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Oakland stadium is a late-brutalist concrete monstrosity set among derelict industrial estates, railway lines and freeways south of San Francisco. Yet inside it still managed to feel festive, filled with 19,000 Oakland Athletics fans, or “A’s fans”, and the impossible California sunshine.

The rhythm of baseball is not unlike the rhythm of cricket. Not much happens, and what does happen is fundamentally just a way of structuring the rich social activity in the stands. People eat, drink, come and go, watch the game, watch each other, and argue about many things, only some of which include baseball, with the flow of their discourse shaped by the events on the field. The A’s fans sometimes break into a ritual chant, “Let’s Go Oak-land”, and at the end of the seventh innings, everyone stands to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. People in bright blue shirts walk up and down selling ice-cream and “snow cones” and “sodas”, calling out their wares like medieval smiths.

Around the stands are a range of kiosks offering hot food, alcohol and A’s merchandise. I bought a cap in the dark green and yellow A’s colours for about the cost of something nice from Paul Smith. We ate what was referred to as a “Big Chili Cheese Dog”, which turned out to be a colossal open hotdog covered with kidney beans, chili sauce and grated cheese – again, for about the cost of a main at a nicer restaurant in San Francisco an hour up the freeway. It was surely most disgusting thing ever intentionally produced for human consumption. We drank Pepsi, because Coke are not an A’s sponsor, and sadly missed the opportunity for a $50 voucher for “auto parts” from a local retailer, which was offered in a competition during the game.

For many innings, pitchers would pitch and batters would bat, cycling through the players three at a time. Occasionally a ball would fly high into the stands, and everyone would reach up to catch it. Despite all the pitching and hitting, no-one seemed to get any points, but even I could see that Oakland’s fielding was woeful, and after an otherwise incomprehensible sequence of events in the seventh innings, the Diamondbacks were 6 runs to Oakland’s 0. With a brief and inadequate comeback, at the “bottom of the ninth” Oakland were slammed 7 to 2.

But no-one seemed to care that much. Everyone shrugged and shook their heads and laughed and got up and went out. It was so great.

A montage of moments of urban public life in Taipei

Watch the Video

There is something of a crisis of confidence in Taiwan at the moment. The economic and political developments of the 1990s have given way to disillusionment with the paralysis of the political process and dissatisfaction with the rather more ordinary rates of economic growth. China is the key factor. On one hand, China's military and political strength directly threaten Taiwan, while in contradistinction, as Taiwanese individuals and businesses relocate to mainland China to enjoy its boom, it is undermining the decades-long Taiwanese national project. The struggle and excitement of creating a new nation is ebbing away as Taiwanese follow the money across the straits. For Taiwan's post-colonial nation-builders, this is a source of sadness and disappointment in their fellow Taiwanese.

Yet, Taiwan's situation can be seen in context. China's boom is distorting politics throughout the region, and indeed the world. Japan is a good example. When the Chinese economy crunches, as it surely will post-Beijing Olympics, the global avarice and apologetics directed towards China will come in for some much-needed correction. This will be as strong in Taiwan as anywhere.

And despite the pessimism, Taiwan's cultural and urban life is flourishing as never before. Contemporary art, film, theatre, and design are, for those who take the time to look, quite simply some of the most interesting and innovative in the world right now. Observers seem to marvel over a million shoddy $40 DVD players shipping out of Shenzhen, when they might be intrigued about a country which produces tvs like this.

Taiwan is beset by the general ignorance of the rest of the world. “China” or “Japan” conjure strong opinions and impressions, while “Taiwan” invokes blank stares and perplexed indifference from one's fellow Westerners. The dynamism and complexity of Taiwan and its cultural and political life, invested with such self-awareness and meaning by Taiwanese people, is folded into the vulnerability and tenuousness of “Taiwan” itself as a viable identity. This dialectic makes Taiwan more intellectually, emotionally, and morally compelling than ever.

VT Art Salon

A member of the bar staff of VT Art Salon, who called herself Little Rabbit (Xiao Tu), shows off just one of her tattoos.

VT Art Salon, B1, No.45-47 Yitong Jie, off Nanjing Dong Lu, Taipei.

A new basement bar and art space. Post-brutalist urban style, bare concrete, spotlights, mirrors, and comfy modern couches. The work that caught my eye was a rotoscope view of busy Ximending. Projected onto a wall, the image panned around 360 degrees, seemingly a frozen still, ala Matrix “bullet time”, until a person or a clock or car would move, moving ahead in time from the rest of the image for a few seconds. A very complex effect, generated with Flash, apparently. Tuesday night was Absolut night, our party making short work of a bottle, with vodka shots all round.

Eslite

Another impression from this week.

Every year another Eslite opens in Taipei, bigger than the last. The newest is a five floor complex in Xinyi, near Taipei 101. Eslite is a “bookstore”, although that word is hardly adequate. The biggest stores have lecture theatres, cinemas, exhibition spaces, restaurants and coffee-shops, and function as sites for the most current cultural trends in Taiwan.

I spent an hour at the new store, and thinking of London’s lifeless and tatty booksellers, wished every minute that an Eslite could open there and show the world how you really sell books in the 21st century.

The aesthetic of Eslite’s stores echoes Japan, with dark wood tones and sharp and elegant graphic design. But unlike Japan’s big bookstores, insular and insulated by the size of the Japanese domestic market, Eslite expresses Taiwan’s location on the edges of China, Japan and the west. Indeed, it is every po-mo buzzword made material – glocalization, hybridity, transnationalism – through its range of books, music and film and cultural events from the Chinese, Japanese, English (and French and German)-speaking worlds, as well as its emphasis on visual and other modes of contemporary culture and its attention to, and cultivation of, “cool”.

Eslite works because of the supreme confidence with which it wields local, regional and global cultural and intellectual life, and the way it consciously balances, or re-balances, cultural activity between Asia and the west. Eslite juxtaposes the cultures and texts of different global regions without any one of them being somehow hegemonic over the others, and delivers its own informed judgment as to what is “in” and worth a reader’s time. It does so by keeping Taiwanese contemporary writing and cultural life at the centre of its activities. Valorizing the Taiwanese counters the potential for global cultural products to become dominant, and it is helped in this enterprise by the beautiful quality and richness of Taiwanese publishing.

Eslite is, of course, a commercial bookseller, and its products are commodities. It is easy enough to critique the commodification of culture. Yet Eslite shows how cultural globalization, tracking the global flow of capital, can still transcend marketization and offer access to the latest and most interesting cultural and intellectual activities around the world.

Taiwan Storyland

This week I have been in Taipei, seeing some very old friends, and some very new ones, doing a little formal meeting and greeting, and getting hold of books and materials to keep on top of what is going on here, impossible though that is. I surprise myself with how much I love being here. Here are some impressions.

In the basement of a building next to the Mitsukoshi department store in the centre of Taipei is the newest franchise of Taiwan Storyland, Taiwan Gushi Guan.

Storyland starts with a museum-like display room, with artifacts and curios from the 18th century to the present, which offer a social history of Taipei accompanied by a surprisingly good audio commentary. Moving through the turnstiles, one enters a somewhat cramped simulation of a local district of Taipei in 1965. There is commerce, with old shops, “traditional” restaurants, and even a “Happy Days” ice-cream parlour (except it offers authentically strange Taiwanese iced bean sweets); there is the state – a post office, police station, a classroom; and domestic life in the living room of a 1965 house, complete with Datong dolls on top of the old tv set.

Storyland, like all such nostalgia theme-parks and social history museums, produces narratives of national identity in which people understand their place in a coherent national story. Making the story coherent means the effacement and elision of alternative and marginal histories, so that visitors recognize themselves in a singular trajectory from that past to their present. Real history is made into nostalgia. In Taiwan Storyland this produces a certain infantilization, as the difficult things of the past are smoothed away, the most obvious being politics. Taipei in 1965 was tense with the US presence, chaos in China, and the KMT military dictatorship. When we saw the police station I joked that I should shout “Down with Chiang Kai-shek” and see if I would be nostalgically arrested and thrown in a simulated prison. The state is absent, too, in its nation-building projects of the 60s, both the sinicization of Taiwanese culture and the “Taiwan Miracle” of state-sponsored modernization. A little 60s cartoon poster warning of the dangers of fallen electricity cables was one of the few markers of the hazardous process of development.

But Taiwan Storyland is not about challenging and questioning multiple histories. Distinctively, it is not a populist public museum but a commercial operation, and with its little simulated stores and restaurants, it shows 1965 Taipei mainly as a place of consumerism. And the stores have old toys and household goods that you can really buy, and the restaurants have food you can really eat. Neatly encapsulating Taiwan’s discursive self-reflexivity and the supreme development of its post-modern capitalist economy, visitors to Taiwan Storyland come to consume the past as the commodity of nostalgia. But in 2006 they also get to literally consume the material commodities of the past all over again, too.

A quiet spot in a large temple complex in Neihu, north of Taipei

When I lived in Taiwan in the late 1990s, I used to zoom around somewhat recklessly on a Yamaha 135cc two-stroke motorcycle. One day, I went hurtling through the winding roads of the hills of Neihu, not far from where this photograph was taken. I came around a blind corner, and felt an impact and a sudden exhalation. I saw the road and then the sky and then the road again, in a series of disconnected snapshots which only later I understood as meaning I was somersaulting over the front of a car. Then I was on my side with an in insect’s eye view of the tarmac. My glasses had gone, and I rolled over to look up and became blurrily aware of a group of bald, robed women standing anxiously over me. I had hit a Toyota being driven by a group of Buddhist nuns. They were speaking agitated Chinese, discussing who should try to speak in English to the foreigner. I assured them I could understand them, and they were quickly on their mobile phones summoning help.

I lay on the road thinking that I just needed a moment to get my breath back, and then I could straighten the bike and ride home. I sat up and briefly saw blood and abrasions, before starting to pass out and giving myself up to the circumstances and those around me.

The nuns had called an ambulance, but before it arrived they commandeered a van to take us to hospital. By this time I had recovered my sense of presence, but was in extreme pain from a leg injury. I suppose I was in shock because my body wanted to cry, except I come from a culture where such behaviour is not acceptable among men, so instead I sat blinking grimly with my jaw clenched. One of the nuns, the youngest, an apprentice, with knee-length robes and still with her long hair, put her open hand over my leg and projected her qi onto the injuries. Immediately, I felt calm and the pain eased.

I cracked the bone near my ankle, ended up with a below-the-knee cast, and spent a couple more weeks in Taipei before flying home.

The Taiwanese can be the nicest people on earth at the best of times, but hop around Taipei on crutches, and they start crossing the street and rushing up to you to ask if you need any help. Table service at McDonalds and your Big Mac meal for free? It happens in Taipei for foreigners on crutches.