Freda Fiala
writer, researcher and curator focused on performance-based artistic practices
Curating Communities, Staging Liveness:
Contemporary Performance in Taiwan
Taiwan, a small island and global powerhouse remains an under-recognised nation that became and continues to be central to globalised dynamics. The project explores how a “networked condition” of contemporary performance has been developed by Taiwan’s new, large-scale performing arts centres (PACs), as institutional bodies, as well as by individual artists, curators, producers and critics, as a vehicle for Taiwan's intercultural communication and diplomacy. It traces the discourse and practices of contemporary performance in the Taiwanese context, looking at its intersecting histories of performance art in the visual arts, live art and contemporary dance, as well as its socio-political and institutional “ecosystem.”Meanwhile, across the broader Asian region, performance “meetings” and “markets” have been innovating production mechanisms based on the rotation and circulation of knowledge and material resources, with initiatives such as YPAM (Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting) or BIPAM (Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting) shaping trans-local conditions of curatorial and artistic collaboration.
The principal questions motivating this research are, firstly, how pathways of performance practice have been formed in an institutionalised arts ecosystem since the early 2000s. Secondly, how recent commitments to the internationalisation of the field have contributed to shaping Taiwan’s position within the East- and South-East Asian regions and further linking them with the “Western” arts and culture hemisphere. By intersecting theatre and performance studies, cultural studies, global art history, informal diplomacy, and cultural policy analysis, this project develops an intersectional understanding of Taiwan’s performance ecosystem, drawing from archival sources as well as an extensive conversation practice with contemporary practitioners.
October, organised by Wang Mo-Lin, Sanzhi (1987), (c) Wang Jun-Jieh.
Quỳnh Lam, 2023 ADAM Artist Lab (c) Taipei Performing Arts Center
Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), (c) OMA
– Associated Publications –
[forthcoming, spring 2025, peer-reviewed] “Empty Stages, Crowded Studios, Networked Bodies: ADAM’s East Asian Perspectives on Contemporary Performance,” in The Routledge Companion to Performance Art, eds. Lucian O’Connor, Graciela Ovejero Postigo, Natalie Loveless, and Jennie Klein.
[forthcoming, fall 2024] “Expanded Choreography in the Context of East Asia/Taiwan: River Lin’s Artist-Curator Practice,” Choreography+ Project by Anna Leon and Johanna Hilari. [Web-Publication]
[2024] “The Taipei Performing Arts Center and the Bauhaus – The Visceral Economy of “Avant-Garde”,” in Curatography. The Study of Curatorial Culture, ISSUE 13 The Economy of Curation and the Capital of Attention (11/2024). [in English and Chinese]
2024 “The island between fiction and reality 虛構與現實之間的島,” PAR 表演藝術(Performing Arts Redefined). [in English and Chinese]
2022 “Windows into Performance Art: River Lin’s artistic and curatorial Practices,” The Theatre Times.
2021 [peer-reviewed] “Rezension zu Katherine Mezur/Emily Wilcox: Corporeal Politics Dancing East Asia.: Michigan: University of Michigan Press 2020” rezens.tfm, Nr. 2021/1.
2020 [peer-reviewed] “Night Market Theatre. Taiwan’s Cultural Diplomacy,” Das Reispapier.
– Associated Activities –
2024 EU Residency for Art and Culture Critics, Kyoto Experiment Festival, Critic-in-Residency, Japan.
2024 “The limits of expanded choreography: Eurocentric paradigm or critical potential?,” University of Bern, Workshop with Anna Leon and Johanna Hilari, together with David Castillo, Freda Fiala, Dawit Seto, Willimann/Arai, Kaldi Moss, Marcel Kieslich, Sophia Newand Daniel Belasco Rogers (Plan B), and Charlotta Ruth.
2024 “Networked Bodies. Performance and its history/ies in East Asia,” Academic Teaching, Institute for Theatre Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.
2023/24 “Queering the canon – looking at the multiple histories of performance art,” Academic Teaching, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.
2023/24 “Performing MyOther. Exoticising and self-exoticising as performative practices,” Academic Teaching, Institute for Theatre Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Austria.
2023 EU Japan-Fest Office, Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting (YPAM), Research Stipend, Japan.
2023 Invited Observer at the ADAM (Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance) Gathering, together with Indranjan Banerjee, Taipei Performing Arts Center (TPAC), Taiwan.
2022 “Taiwan und die stürmische Weltpolitik” [Taiwan and stormy world politics], in conversation with Alice Grünfelder and Andrea Hauer, Ö1 Punkt 1, Austria.
2021 “Performing Art Centers as transgenerational models?,” Lecture, Vienna Center for Taiwan Studies (VCTS), Austria.
2021 “Masks and Masking in Contemporary Asian Performance Art. Bodily Politics as Strategies of Critical Globalism,” Lecture, Tanzquartier Wien (TQW), Austria.
2020 DOC-Scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW DOC)
2020 “Research and performance art education,” Guest Lecture, National Taiwan University of Arts (NTUA), Taiwan.