A Red Roomer’s Perspective: Stage Time & Wine 76

Red Room, by now, has made a name for itself as an open, enlivening environment that is verdant with the arts.  It’s a venue that, through its events and activities, bends over backwards both for the artists and for patrons who will go to great lengths just to have the presence of the arts dappling their lives.  The cup of inspiration is passed around freely, that everyone present might drink deep of it, and numerous people are in the wings volunteering their time, energy and miscellaneous forms of artistic mojo to create this platform that people can come stand upon.

When people do make an outing to Red Room’s ‘Stage Time and Wine’ they will bring a multitude of things with them as the vehicle for their practice — instruments for music, paper for stories or poems, their own twisting, shifting frames for dance.  It’s rare that an evening at Stage and Wine passes without something unexpected, rare and robust taking the stage, though skilled exercises of more traditional and time-honored disciplines are inevitably present as well.  It is framed as a sharing and listening environment, though I personally suspect that a lot of people appear at Red Room events for the scene and the unique character of its actors.  Red Room’s events are also a branching-off point to involvement in various other art scenes and events in Taipei.

Red Room’s Stage Time and Wine forms the foundations of a constantly changing and contorting chalice that serves as an axis for the city’s arts.  Since constantly-available venue has arrived to serve as the organization’s sanctuary (Red Room regulars will remember the hard times, when all we had was Stage Time and Wine once a month), a variety of gallery showings, concerts and other savory happenings have blossomed in this newly-available fertile soil.  Incidents at the Red Room are always worth a look.

Max Power is a Taipei local artist who writes and illustrates bittersweet dreamland fairy tales and histories of far-off worlds. his illustrations can be seen at facebook.com/seenerie .