【Arts & Culture】The Largest Chinese Community Performing Arts Festival – The Little Theater Arts Festival

By MOOK Scenic Spots Family Travel & Lifestyle Network Editorial Team
 

The 2015 "Live Your Life" launched on April 25 in Beijing, traveling to Beijing, Taipei, and Kaohsiung with nearly 50 performances in total. This year also marks the first inclusion of teams from Hong Kong and scripts from Singapore, making it the largest-scale little theater arts festival event in the Chinese-speaking region.

This year’s 2015 "Live Your Life" adopts the concept of “life as theater” as the spirit of the festival. Building upon the collaborative performance model of the past three years, it has helped Taiwanese audiences gain a deeper understanding of the creative works by young talents from both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Through this arts festival, organizers hope to take another step forward in cross-strait cultural and artistic exchanges. This year, the event is jointly held again in Taipei, Kaohsiung, and Beijing, featuring ten works by creators from both sides of the Strait, including the first-ever participation of a Hong Kong team. These works aim to foster mutual understanding and collaboration among emerging young artists, while using the cultural language of theater to engage and communicate with the general public.

◎5/22 - 24"Macbeth" by Huang Ying Studio
Venue: Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Multi-function Performance Hall

A brave Scottish general, Macbeth, encounters three witches in the wilderness who prophesy that he will become the King of Scotland. Fueled by ambition and egged on by his wife, the testosterone-driven Macbeth seizes the throne. To cover his tracks, he murders his former comrades-in-arms, suppresses political opponents, and brutalizes their families. Terror and paranoia consume Macbeth. Staged using Tadashi Suzuki’s training method and directed by Huang Ying, this production offers a unique interpretation of Macbeth.

◎5/29 - 31"Hello, Robbery!" by Zhe Teng Culture

Venue: Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Multi-function Performance Hall

Two honest and kind-hearted robbers, four indifferent bank employees, numerous profit-driven royal FBI agents, and countless cautious citizens all cross paths on a dark Friday afternoon. Thus, their anxieties and confusions, impulses and desires, repressions and outbursts, rebellions and warmth—all unfold, intertwine, and tangle within that one fateful Friday afternoon.

◎5/29 - 31"Ten Directions, One Thought" by Alice Theater Lab(Hong Kong)

Venue: Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, LAB Creative Lab
The story draws inspiration from the lives and works of four literary masters—Eileen Chang, Salvador Dalí, Richard Wagner, and Antonin Artaud. Directed by Stanley Chen (winner of the Hong Kong Drama Awards and Hong Kong Little Theater Awards for Best Director), the production uses devised theater to explore the theories of Theatre of Cruelty, presenting the life, death, love, and hate of these iconic figures through poetic stage imagery.