Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalists

This performance timely and appropriately embedded Twilight of the Gods with struggles of the domestic social movement, and rightly adopted the indoor and outdoor space of “Huashan’s four joined warehouses,” and transformed them into the site of the original work, enabling Wagner’s apocalyptic prediction to be lively represented in Taipei city center. This “new theater of music” or “theater of sound” created an imaginative, sublime and layered theatrical effect through a freewheeling and efficient script, unique visual design and an exquisite amalgamation of music and noise, not only successfully interpreted and deconstructed the original work, but also fully elaborated on the idea of “total art.”(Commentator / CHEN Han-Jin)

Artwork Introduction

In 2014, Against Again Troupe was invited by Hung-Hung, the curator of Der Ring des Nibelungen: A Revolution Unarmed, to join in the theater project featuring new and non-operatic retellings of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and to re/ present the last part Götterdämmerung. In this theatrical production without a director, the musicians, actors and puppeteer worked together to break down the boundaries between stage acting, instrument performing and backstage technology. The result of the collective effort was a “theater of sound” aesthetically built on the sense of hearing. Every stage of the process, from its conception, workshop, rehearsal, design, technical execution to the performance, was an attempt to achieve “collective creation,” as a tribute to Wagner’s anarchist ideals and a redefinition of his concept of “total theater. Götterdämmerung uses symbolism to merge Wagner’s original text with the contemporary events of 318 Occupy Legislature Movement in Taiwan, Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and Occupy Wall Street. In the play Wotan’s crows announce the news of apocalyptic scenes, catastrophes, and riots while the original ending of flames flaring up in Valhalla is transformed into real-time projection of chemical experiments on stage, rendering a contemporary interpretation of Götterdämmerung through text revision and aesthetic expression. “Sound design,” the axis of production, constructs the narrative of the whole performance. Whereas the original compositions are deconstructed and adapted into noise rock, “language,” being changed in tone and rhythm by various human voice expressions, is juxtaposed on stage with foley performance, characters’ soliloquies, and instrumental performance to create scenes of soundscape. Their division of labor being blurred, performers, musicians, designers, and sound operators act together on the same stage, creating a new form of expression for the “theater of sound.”

About the Artist

Originally names “Refusing to Grow Up Once Again Troupe,” Against Again Troupe was founded by a group of artists working in cross-disciplinary theater in Taiwan in 2002, specializing in productions that include theatre and musicperformances, exhibitions, and curation of festivals. Their performances focus on site-specific theater, music theater and epic theater, using approaches such as repetition, non-narrative, collage of images, and the alienation effect to create works combined with objects, sound art as well as multi-media art.