Mr. Robin Ruizendaal and the TTT Puppet Theatre of Taiwan are set to bring grassroots Taiwanese culture to Brent Cross Shopping Centre Sept 10-11. Led by world-renowned puppet master Chen Xihuang, they will demonstrate various elements of traditional puppet performance, including the delicate gestures of a refined lady, an exciting fight scene choreographed to Nankuan music, a Chinese lion dance and an old man smoking a real pipe. This colourful show is part of “Taiwan Festival-a Cultural Fest of Enchanting Taiwan” sponsored by Taipei Representative Office in the UK.
Performance schedule Times & Dates: 1200, 1400, 1600 Saturday 10 September 2005 1300, 1500
Sunday 11 September 2005 Venue: Brent Cross Shopping Centre, Centre Court (nearest tube station: Hendon Central)
Interview opportunity Mr. Ruizendaal, an 11-year resident of Taiwan and director of TTT, will be available for interview throughout the weekend. He holds a wealth of knowledge on Chinese and Taiwanese culture, gleaned from years of research in sinology.
Brief biography of Robin Ruizendaal Mr. Ruizendaal, a Dutch national, first began learning Mandarin at 19 and continued his studies at Holland’s Leiden University. In the early 1980s, he began research on his doctoral dissertation on Chinese marionette theatre, a topic that would gain him a kind of access to Chinese culture that few researchers before him had enjoyed.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NATALIE FALGARONE
“I thought [puppet theatre] was a nice window to research Chinese society because it’s not upper-class culture, it’s grassroots culture,” he said.
“At the time China was very closed. We didn’t know anything about what was happening in the countryside. I thought it was a really interesting, very localized form of art through which I could observe society, because it’s related to religion, social groups, theatre, language, music. It had many elements which interested me.”
In China, his research followed people associated with the art form from the Republican period in the 1920s, through the Cultural Revolution and up to the 1990s. Today Ruizendaal’s job is as much popularization of puppetry as it is preservation. His main tasks are making new plays based on traditional ones, creating a new audience for live puppet theatre and promoting it abroad.
Contact If you are interested in interviewing Mr. Ruizendaal, please contact Yvonne Liang, Press Division of the Taipei Representative Office in the UK, on 020 7881 2676 or email presstro@taiwan-tro.uk.net.
Last Update: August 13, 2005
