Sense of place: will it go away? Jiafenzai District "Soundscape Memory of Shuttle Waterway" → "Planting Beans" → "Jiafen Stack"

Drama 2018–10–22 Super Intimate Little Theatre Festival@2018

Performance Fan Qinhui (Taiwan) → Xue Meihua (Taiwan) → Zhang Zhonghao (Taiwan)
Time2018/10/14 11:00
Location Baode Park opposite the main entrance of Dongyuan Elementary School (meeting point)→Taipei Donglong Palace→​Cura Pizza

Text - Luo Qian

Finally came to the last area of ​​the 2018 Super Intimate Small Opera Festival, the Jiabengzai District (“Swamp” in the Ketagalan language of the Pingpu ethnic group) in the southern half of Wanhua. Urban buildings have been formed from swamp wetlands and farmland settlements. Shi Peiyu, the artistic director of the Xiaoxi Festival, mentioned the three treasures of the gnats at the beginning: bean sprouts, jasmine flowers, and hemp bamboo shoots. The jasmine flowers have disappeared, and the other two are hidden on the way to watch the opera today. [1] If the Mengka District is a physical route that summons a sense of place, the Tiaotong District is an immersive return to the scene, and the Jiabengzai District seems to be lingering and disappearing - how can we see or reproduce the history of disappearance again?

"Soundscape Memory of Shuttle Waterway" walk west from Baode Park to Donglong Palace, which is close to the Huanhe Expressway, perform "Planting Beans" on the first floor of Donglong Palace, and then follow a straight line from Donglong Palace with three sections. Go east with different road names (Dechang Street, Baoxing Street Lane 140, Dongyuan Street Lane 66), turn right when you reach Dongyuan Street, and arrive at the pizza restaurant Cura Pizza, where you can watch "Jia Beng Zhan". Three points can be connected to form a clockwise triangle on the map.

"Soundscape Memory of Shuttle Waterway" is mainly based on earphone sound listening. The creator Fan Qinhui designed a 30-minute audio tour of about one kilometer, leading participants to walk around the block, from Baode Park to Dongyuan Street Lane 154, turn left to Dongyuan Lane 154, Lane 9, and continue to Lane 156, Changtai Street, and see a traditional convenience store at the corner of Changtai Street. Continue straight into Lane 139, Changtai Street. This alley looks no different from other alleys, but it is a gathering place for printing factories and bean sprouts in the past. Turn right at Lane 424, Wanda Road, and at the corner is the Taiwanese Presbyterian Church Shuangyuan Church, which has existed for 120 years. On the right hand side of Lane 424, Wanda Road, is the Yang Family Old House and the Old Well, which may be the earliest Han settlement in Taipei City. 【2】【3】Turn right to the opposite lane of Baoxing Street Recycling Plant. You can also see the stream flowing to Xindian River. You can see many bean sprouts and vegetable shells drifting by. 【4】If you keep moving forward, you will find an illustration of an otter at the intersection of Lane 222, Changtai Street (one of the illustrations series of "Horizaitou Disappearance Memorial Book", by Zhou Mingyi), 【5】Before the river is paved with asphalt In the past, the memory of the older generation had seen the sight of water wrasse catching loach. From Lane 222 of Baoxing Street, go to Lane 27, Lane 185, Dechang Street, in the direction of Darongshu. This is the collective residence of the taxi trade union. Walk into the fire alley with slender moss, and finally arrive at Lane 185 of Dechang Street (already close to The expressway around the river), the creator Fan Qinhui asked us to feel the sound we heard here, only to hear the noisy cars and locomotives constantly whizzing past.

During this listening journey, it is not easy to hear and see the waterways that are hidden or disappeared underground. We can hear "the past here", but we cannot "see" what is described in the voice, what is described in the voice The sights, the voices that we have to listen to, are hard to identify. How this place existed, disappeared, changed, and became a bit like the rest of the area now. "Soundscape Memory of Shuttle Waterway" identifies the past of the place through the locations in the route, reorganizes the memory of the place, and recognizes the place through the audio guide. participants), and jointly shape the memory of the place in "Soundscape Memory of Shuttle Waterway", from strangeness to familiarity for outsiders, strangeness in familiarity with local people, we feel strange in the place, and the place The rupture of the relationship forms a kind of place that should be familiar but feels blank, or has no feeling, such as the accidental spontaneous combustion of many unretained cultural assets. As a person from non-Wanhua District, although I established the local memory of the Gengzai District from "Soundscape Memory of Shuttle Waterway" (in fact, it can be said that every route in each district of the Xiaoxi Festival is helping the participants to establish the right place The sense of place), but I can't connect to the Gungzai district that the voice told me in the past that I want to be seen and heard by everyone. The scenery disappears too quickly, and the next second often falls into nostalgia too quickly.

The leader did not go from the main entrance, but from an alley at the end of Lane 185 to Donglong Palace. "Planting Beans" mainly focuses on objects, plants, light and shadow, and puppets. The creator, Xue Meihua, created a wooden cabinet of Duobaoge. She wears a foldable bamboo hat, like a nomad who can start a story wherever she goes. She just arrived at Wanhua Donglong Palace to rest, and there is a large wooden cabinet on the cart. , The ultra-fine teapot has prepared tea (small teacups smaller than fingers) waiting for the audience to enter into the dark storage room like a dark storage room to serve it, and there is a mikoshi behind the wooden cabinet. Xue Meihua used these small objects and props to tell stories. We traveled to the past and present of Jiabianzai District like the reincarnated birds from generation to generation. In the middle of the night, people hatching beans, farming and planting bamboo shoots. The flat land has become a tall building, and the water from wells has become an unimaginable past. People live in boxes like drawers in tall buildings, and tap water is available at the touch of a button. Supermarkets and McDonald's are blooming everywhere... I love that "Planting Beans" changes silently in extremely small scales, without dialogue (although there are radio and TV news sounds as background assistance), focusing on creating images that belong here, and drawing out emotions about places that have disappeared.

"Jia Beng Zhan" focuses on audience interaction. The creator, Zhang Zhonghao, is a local resident and businessman. The audience asks questions through pizza props. In the past, his grandparents ran a traditional Chinese medicine store in this two-story house, and his father took over the operation of the traditional Chinese medicine store. In this Dongyuan neighborhood, which has not raised rents for 30 years, he has built ​Cura Pizza in 2016. During the audience's questioning, there was also the performer Yu Mingzhu's puppet manipulation, accompaniment and assistance. Zhang Zhonghao talked about his family history, the gnat district in his memory, his favorite pizza, and he went to Italy to study art and then to Japan to study. Finally, using the craftsmanship of making pizza on the spot, knead the dough, sprinkle with bamboo shoots, bake at 400 to 450 degrees for 60 to 90 seconds, and slice the round cake fluently with a knife. In Zhang Zhonghao's story, the gnat-flavored pizza is served with special olive chili oil, which is very delicious. Compared with the image of the gnat area in "Planting Beans", the gnat area in "Adding Beng Stack" is a concrete and visible space, expressing local emotions and memories with houses that have been handed down for three generations. Still here, working and living in the same block, the place is not just a place, but also emotions are attached to it.

It can be said that none of the nine performances in the three districts of the Xiaoxi Festival can exist without being attached to the place, just as the space and inertia accumulated in life form a sense of place. From the point of view of social construction, [6] also sees changes to the place due to economic development and urban changes in the three districts. Will places disappear? Yes, some have disappeared or are on the verge of disappearing (however, in non-metropolitan areas, change is usually very slow). Borrowing from the view of geographer Allan Pred's paper "Place is a Historical Contingency Process", he believes that place is not just a measurable and fixed concept, "Place is never 'complete', but always in 'flux'. ’ (becoming).” [7] Places are constantly changing with human factors, which is why nostalgia can continue to be generated from personal and cultural memories, and it also risks ossifying local memory. At some point, we all need places to maintain traces of what people once existed. Thus, the creator may not be able to stop disappearing, but he can reorganize the place, thereby conjuring the place (whether nostalgic, constructed or mutilated). The audience's body moves in the space, and the body begins to establish a sense of place. The original unfamiliar space becomes a recognizable place. Although it also faces the homogeneity of placelessness and landscape created by the development of modern cities. It’s very similar”, making it easy for us to have no sense of a place and to be unable to discern how this place is different from that place.

An ultra-intimate little drama festival featuring watching theaters and walking on the street. From the perspective of how to shape the knowledge of a place (even if it is not a place I have existed or lived in), it is not too tourist-oriented. , combined with the local cultural history and the creator's local creation, resisting the homogeneity of the place in the lack of locality in many places (based on the reality of Taiwan), and opening the participants to the question of "what else is there in this place that was not deliberately created? , but what exists in the first place is just...” and so on, and the sense of place created by such physical movement is the way to constantly re-awaken the sense of place, and it also has its cognitive significance.

Notes

1. The 2018 Super Intimate Small Drama Festival plus the electronic program list of Gengzai District. Website: http://closetoyoufestival.com/2018/playbill/southwanhua.pdf. Review date: 2018/10/16.

2. Chen Xianglan, "The earliest Han settlement exists in Wanhua Yangjia Ancient House in Taipei City", release date: 2017/11/13, newtalk. URL: https://newtalk.tw/news/view/2017-11-13/103612. Review date: 2018/10/18.

3. Liu Zhiwei, "Seeing Taipei's No. 1 Village "From Kabengzai to East Garden". Release date: 2017/08/13, Taipei Village Voice - Find Taipei City for a walk. URL: http://www.urstaipei.net/citywalker/walk?view=adm_new&id=1489. Review date: 2018/10/18.

4. Zheng Jinyao, "The Secret of Wanhua Bean Sprout Street that Hatches 80% of Taipei's Supply in One Street", Release Date: 2018/08/15, Taipei Travel.com. URL: https://www.travel.taipei/zh-tw/featured/details/18030. Review date: 2018/10/18.

5. For information about the "House of Horizon Head Disappearance", please refer to the Mizutani Art website.

URL: http://waleyart.wixsite.com/website/–cpjo . Review date: 2018/10/18.

6. From the point of view of place as a social construction "To think that something is a social construction means that human power is sufficient to change things. So, what does society construct about place? Two things are most obvious: meaning and materiality. )". Tim Cresswell, translated by Xu Tailing and Wang Zhihong, "Place: Memory, Imagination, and Identity", Taipei: Qunxue, 2006, pp. 51–52.

7. Tim Cresswell, Place: Memory, Imagination, and Identity, p. 59.

2018–10–22 First published on Performing Arts Critic