Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

Contemporary avant-garde theater in Taiwan is as the critic Wang Mo-lin said, "Avante-garde theater is gradually compromising with the market economy, fragmenting its texts and shifting power from its center, alienating the features of avant-garde theater in a field dominated by writing." (1996)  If innovative thought is replaced by the relentless pursuit of glamorous imagery and comicality, the spirit and experimentation of avant-garde theater will degenerate and leave us with nothing but engrossing pastimes and jarring sights and sounds.  Superseding the exploration of social issues through its text, Floating Utopia exploits the distinct color of the social workers' movement as displayed in the music of Black Hand Nakashi, questions the overwhelming phenomenon of Taiwanese political vanity through reference to the Tower of Babel in the Bible, and likens intellectuals' indulgence to wandering in a labyrinth of self-limitation. The play transcends the curse of interdisciplinary art forms by preventing performing arts from devolving into the sensual entertainment of the bourgeois or the empty rubric of the intellectual nobility.  This allows the performing arts to break with the stereotypes of mainstream thinking and maintain the critical spirit of avante-garde theater.  (By Ching-lung CHEN)