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12 April 2015, The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

A Red Room Radio Redux*** event in two-parts:

PART ONE:
A round-table read-aloud where guests will be welcome to read from a collection of poems and short prose on food. Everyone is encouraged to bring short pieces of poetry or prose, original or otherwise, on the theme of food. A variety of recorded music will accompany the readings.
We will be joined by special guest readers from the performing arts community of Taipei and environs.

Works by DH. Lawrence, Mark Strand, William Carlos Williams, Maya Angelou, MFK Fisher, Roald Dahl, Tennessee Williams and others.

PART TWO :
A MAD TEA-PARTY faithfully adapted for radio drama by Red Room Radio Redux* from Lewis Carroll’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

Cast of MAD TEA PARTY in alphabetical order:
Sarah Brooks will narrate the story
Taili Huang as the Dormouse
Emmanuel Felix Lespron as the Cheshire Cat
Alton Thompson as the March Hare
Pat Woods as the Hatter
Whitney Zahar as Alice

Produced and directed by Ruth Giordano
***Red Room Radio Redux is part of the Red Room Community  “dedicated to listening”. The Red Room is an ever-expanding community, exploring and extending the boundaries between audience and performer; a not-for-profit platform for events developing a culture of learning to listen to each other, what is around us and our selves.
Our sponsor is the Ripplemaker Foundation, enabling people to realize their dreams by supporting entrepreneurial, social, cultural and environmental projects. Ripples change lives.

Sunday, April 12 2015
from 2:00pm – 5:00pm

Tickets: NT500
Ticket price includes a selection of raw canapes and wine.
Naked Food
1F, No. 22-1, Lane 160, Xinsheng South Road, Section 1, Zhongzheng District Taipei


Proceeds to Christian Salvation Service (CSS)
www.csstaipei.com

In R4 news: July 2014

Short Story Project

Back in May, a few of our readers met ​ at the ICRT studio to record voice track​s for a few​ Great Western Short Stories ​.​
I’ve been listening to those audio files and pairing the​m​ with some Great Western Music ​ in preparation for the mixing process which will start in a few weeks..
The folks at ICRT are especially keen on our Sherlock Holmes story: A Scandal in Bohemia.​ They recommend creating a series and the Holmes/Watson stories of Arthur Conan Doyle could be a good choice.

Incidentally, Pat Woods and Charlie Storrar read our Ignatz Ratzywatzky’s adaptation of the SCANDAL aloud at the Taipei Literature Festival on August 2 at Huashan Park.

Promotional Video Project

Meanwhile, William Openshaw of the RR video-recording division has been working on a video of our WasteLand performed at the April Aside @ The Red Room​.​ He and I will meet in August to take the next step towards a functional promotional video for R4.

The R4 Portfolio

Lastly but not leastly, with a deeply appreciative bow to Roma Mehta: the R4 portfolio has passed the design/development stage and gone to the Printers! Looking forward to putting that item ​to work making ​good​ connections ​with potential clients​.

(c) Copyright 2014 Red Room.  Material on this site is the property of contributing members of the Red Room Community. Please do not copy any part of this publication. Thank you.

Aside 5, a magical evening, March 2014

As I sat here contemplating about Aside 5, I realized that the definition of the title changed for me this time around. The last Aside event was simply to set “aside” the more free-spirited people and magnify my hopes in becoming one of them in the future. But in Aside 5, I felt as if the purpose of the event was, for me, to push “aside” all my expectations and stereotypes I had developed in my mind and be exposed, once more, to the necessary facets of life. It was as if I was to experience a rebirth and see the world for the first time again.

The mini-capsule of renaissance started with Josh Drye, a musician from North Carolina. When Drye came on to the stage, he simply took out his guitar and spoke a bit about the fundamentals of his music. He said that in his home region, they like to use one basic chord as the background chord. After this brief introduction, he quickly began to perform. He sang songs he composed and songs by other people—all of them were the songs of the Appalachians, best known as bluegrass. But even though they were all very pleasing to the ear, I still craved the sound of the banjo. In my mind, bluegrass just did not make sense without the sound of the banjo. It is no wonder why babies cry when they are pulled out of their mommy’s belly; the frustration at the unfamiliarity of their surroundings is so overwhelming that the only rational response is to lash out and cry.

I was already screaming like a maniac inside (“Where the heck is the banjo?!”) when comedian/storyteller, Charlie Storrar, confided in the audience, “I went through a process of rebirth myself.” It was as if Storrar’s message was directed at me. For a second, I saw a halo light up above Storrar’s head. But then, he said, “I am a Reborn Sinner.” And poof, there goes the halo. Before Storrar became the man he is today, he was Celibate Charlie. Storrar was trying to woo a girl with a box of cheap chocolates at fifteen. And to please her even more, he followed her into her Christian faith—but the moment he stepped foot inside the church, he decided to fall in love with Jesus instead.

Storrar loved being a Christian, but he also admitted that dedicating himself to God did not help him get over his need to “fill that void” and he constantly needed to patch it up “with his right hand.” And so at around the age of thirty, he decided to leave the Christian faith and finally will himself to sin again. Storrar’s story sounded too much like a bad joke to be true—“a British walks into a church with a box of cheap chocolates in attempt to seduce a girl, but was, instead, seduced by Jesus the man Himself.” All that is missing here is a rabbi.

I was having difficulty wrapping my head around the concept of being seduced by something abstract and conservative when Tina Ma, the Red Room Muse, walked in gracefully with a gu zheng and helped to demonstrate this seduction right away. The beginning of Ma’s music was very meditative. But as she began to pepper in a narrative about spring—“the mating season,” all one could think about was “sex.” It was as if Ma had grinded up all the Viagra she could find in the drug stores and just decided to sprinkle all the love dust onto the Red Roomers while casually playing her gu zheng.

Tina Ma’s performance was very creative, but I would have to say nothing could be more creative than what the Radio Redux group had to bring us that night at Aside 5. The Red Room Radio Redux group (R4) had always presented spectacular dramas in the past. But this time, the writer of R4 transformed T. S. Eliot’s poem “Wasteland” into drama form. Four actors—Marc Anthony, Adrianna Smela, Charlie Storrar, and Pat Woods—whispered, and shouted, and danced, and raged throughout the entire poem. R4’s mission is to introduce Western canon to its audience; not only have they done a great job this time, they have changed my perception about how a poem should be read. By having four people act out “Wasteland,” the R4 group had successfully portrayed the diverse themes of confusion and personas in the poem.

R4, Tina Ma, Charlie Storrar, and Josh Drye—seeing these four amazing artists at Aside 5 was like seeing a big yellow submarine in a bottle. And after this thought came to my head, I had one final revelation. I am very thankful that I had discovered the Red Room; because of the Red Room, I would not have to travel very far to see the world, the world would all be there with me in this one cozy space.

Wendy Wan Yi Chen
Class of 2014
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature National Taiwan University

(c) Copyright 2014 Red Room.  Material on this site is the property of contributing members of the Red Room Community. Please do not copy any part of this publication. Thank you.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, a radio drama, March 2014

For Aside @The Red Room on March 29, 2014

​Red Room Radio Redux (R ​4)​ has been commissioned to present a reading of ​TS Eliot’s​ The Waste Land, ​widely regarded as one of the most important modern poems of the 20th century.  For this special reading of the poem, The Waste Land has been adapted for four voices with live sound effects and accompanied by the music by influential contemporaries of the poet: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berlin, Ravel, and popular music in London at the time. Featuring the vocal talents of Marc Anthony, Andrianna Smela, Charlie Storrar, and Pat Woods. Directed by Ruth Landowne Giordano. Original concept and script by Ignatz Ratzkywatzky, The text is rich with dramatic situations, dialogs, lyrics, foreign languages and the inner workings of the poet’s mind during a time of rapid social changes. This will surely be a unique approach to this historic piece.

FROM THE DESK OF Ignatz Ratzkywatzky, dramaturge, writer, and originator:

T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land: A Radio Drama probes the mystery of existence, the angst of the human heart and the marvelous irony that our dread of death celebrates our elation and passion to live.

From Wikipedia:

“The Waste Land” is a long poem written by T.S. Eliot. It is widely regarded as “one of the most important poems of the 20th century” and a central text in Modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the U.K. in the October issue of The Criterion and in the U.S. in the November issue of The Dial. It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are “April is the cruellest month”, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”, and the mantra in the Sanskrit language “Shantih shantih shantih“.]

Eliot’s poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of the contemporary social condition in British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon and from Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads.  The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures.

The poem’s structure is divided into five sections. The first section, titled The Burial of the Dead introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, titled A Game of Chess employs vignettes of several characters—alternating narrations—that address those themes experientially. The Fire Sermon, the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After a fourth section that includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, What the Thunder Said concludes with an image of judgment.

(c) Copyright 2014 Red Room.  Material on this site is the property of contributing members of the Red Room Community. Please do not copy any part of this publication. Thank you.