The Word from R4, June 2016
Photos from Treasure Island
The monthly gathering known as R4 ReadAloud has shifted to the SECOND FRIDAY of each month.
The R4 ReadAloud vision/mission/concept/raison d’etre is TBE (To Be Evolved). And maybe it’s meant to be constantly evolving…is it a variation on a book club? good practice for actors and storytellers? an opportunity to share something meaningful? just a chance to hear our own voices?
OR
All of the above?
Reflections, Stage Time & Purple 78
My grip slackened for what seemed like the tenth time, and my pen rolled off the smooth paper onto the mattress. StageTime & Wine had only just begun, but I had already discovered how difficult taking notes at my final Stage Time would be. More and more, I found I wanted to listen without pausing to scribble down a moment or a turn of phrase.
Eventually, I just gave up, settled back into the pillow, and contented myself with listening. It’s funny, what you remember without notes. You remember people’s nervousness in front of the microphone, because it reflects your own, and because you join the crowd eagerly in helping that nervousness dissipate. You remember the sound of someone’s voice,and the sentiment behind the song rather than the specific lyrics. You remember the theme of a story, the sense of a moment, the feeling of a night rather than a title or a name or a progression.
That night, Holly’s clear, resonant voice carried us through a musical recovering from heartbreak. Joyce’s light exuberance interwove with the strumming on her ukelele as she and a friend sang a few songs. Max’s incisive playfulness trickled through the audience, popping pockets of laughter in the crowd as he read a new piece of writing. Simmo’s easy-going demeanor was quickly overtaken by the strength of his voice. After he finished, the audience called him back for a rendition of “House of the Rising Sun”. Channy’s surprise drag performance of “Don’t Stop me Now” delighted us all.
Midway through the night, I decided to go up for my third and final time. I rarely share at Stage Time, preferring to write about and talk with those who do, but I felt compelled to speak at my last. Over the months of volunteering with the Red Room, it had expanded from event to platform; platform to community; community to family. Being a part of Red Room added an experience to my life that expands and metamorphosed from month to month in such a way that it is impossible to summarize. The volunteers who lift up Red Room and who build it, are such a diverse group of loving individuals, and I’m grateful to have known them. All I can say is this, if you have attended a Red Room event, take a moment to speak with the volunteers and, maybe, if you have a few hours every month, volunteer yourself. It will be worth your time.
Leah List is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan’s Political Science and International Studies program. She is an aspiring writer, researcher, human rights advocate and a believer in the importance of storytelling. She is also a volunteer at the Red Room.
Reflections, Stage Time & Juice, May 21 2016
Check out videos and photos from May 21 on our Facebook page.
The title of our May 21 Stage Time and Juice: Mum’s the Word! is a play on the themes of Mother’s Day and spring. What could be more spring-like than to celebrate life from the perspective of insects? The Juicers were treated to bouncing grasshoppers, whiny bees, supercilious water striders, tragic mayflies, and self-important cicadas, as interpreted through the poems of Paul Fleischman. The poems, read by two readers at once, sometimes in synchrony, sometimes not, demonstrated how poetry can sometimes be performed as a form of music.
Sue DeSimone, on the other hand, seemed to be bugged by something else, leading the Juicers in a plea for ice cream. Her guitar accompanist, Jimmy, seems to have been infected with her melancholy, because he broke into a bit of blues himself after her song was done.
Devry presented a soliloquy from Henry the V while waving around a sword…um…bamboo stick. Two young sisters performed a violin and cello duet from the Japanese animated film “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” One young man sang a song named “Seven”, deploring his lost youth at the ripe old age of nine, and then finished with a keyboard rendition of “Chopsticks” with his mother. His brother did a couple of magic tricks. A pair of siblings read from their favorite story books, one talking about what mommies do and the other describing the sentimental value of a scarf. Finally, two little monkeys demonstrated what it means to be on a roll.
And that’s what you missed at Stage Time and Juice!
Carol Yao
Reflections, Aside 13, April 30 2016
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said,
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Aside 13 at the Red Room was a three hour journey along the paths of 5 individual and group performers- each with their own story of adventure and wonder to share. The evening opened with words from Red Room’s co-founder, Ping Chu. Ping encouraged the audience to reflect on the importance of the people we meet throughout or travels. “At Red Room,” he said, “it takes only a minute to meet someone, but a lifetime to forget them.” While the day-to-day interactions we have with our friends and colleagues may seem trivial in the moment, Ping reminds us that life is a collection of a multitude of moments, each shaping our experiences, like stones lying in the middle of a narrow stream.
The evening flowed onward to the first performer, Tina Ma. Tina spun a tale of blazing one’s own future and identity through facing different challenges. Her story-song used the personification of animals to symbolize the the wise lessons we can learn from nature. She urged the audience to meditate on the importance of emotion and kindness in our actions, asking “When we act, do we use all four chambers of our heart?” Tina’s question made us wonder: are we full hearted in our interactions and experiences, or do we simply give half of ourselves? Her performance asserted that in order to learn, love, and give to the world, we have to use all four chambers of the heart and feel love flowing through all aspects of our being.
As if mirroring the heart beat pumping blood and life throughout us all, Mia Hsieh used her steel drum to play a song that strikingly embodied the light-hearted nature of travel. In contrast, her vocal tones expressed a yearning for something lost along the way. After all, while Emerson emphasized the whimsy of weaving one’s own trail, he also posited that ” Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” Mia’s song led the listener to believe that perhaps the singing traveller had neglected to hold fast to “the beautiful,” mistakenly confusing the painful lessons of growth with regret and flaw- forgetting that experiences mould us and therefore beautify the paths on which we walk.
Sue de Simone candidly told the audience about walking her own beautiful journey through growth. She began with a rock song based on the adage, “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” telling the audience of how a benign brain tumor lead to a series of addictions from cigarettes to alcohol, from alcohol to cigarettes and from cigarettes to chocolate. While the story was harrowing, Sue used humor to draw attention to her current reality- a successful performer, healthy and full of life.
Rocking us back to the past, Ruth Giordano and the Red Room Radio Redux crew shared an excerpt from their upcoming show, “Treasure Island.” The connection to the evening’s theme is clear- a journey across the sea to find an elusive prize. Although “Treasure Island” may be a classic, the excerpt left the audience wondering how the story would end.
As if on cue, the night came to a hopeful close with Scott Prairie and Mia Hsieh’s collaboration on a series of songs. The final song in their set reminded the audience that, “it’s going to be ok.” With this upbeat and energetic close, the audience rose back to life, bustling hurriedly to catch old friends before heading home and to embrace new friends will a full heart.
Kristin S. is new to Taipei and is excited to volunteer at the Red Room as a rookie. In her free time she enjoys reading psychological thrillers, exploring new cities, and yoga.
Because of you
Because of you
Red Room would not be here if not for you.
I want to take this opportunity to thank Red Room volunteers. (Alison Gao, Lily Hung, Chamber Lai, Kristin Smith, Max Power, Alexandra Gilliam, Christiana Chien, Shameez Joubert, Erin Vasseur, Trevor Trebotski Tortomasi, Ruth Giordano, Sue DeSimone, Carol Yao, Jennifer Joy, Manav Mehta, Roma Mehta, Meghan Keller, Francis Maginn, Addison Eng, Leah List, Julia Kao, Vicky Sun, Warde Khalaf, Kristie Young, Claire Linn, William Openshaw, Sharon Landon, Ana Culiolis, Emily Loftis, JJ Chen, Stephanie Chen, Charles Haines, Andrew Quirk, Alex Houghton, James Lo, Constance Woods, Ayesha Mehta, and so many more).
Ayesha and I co-founded Red Room, however, the real driving force behind Red Room’s success is Roma, the Keeper of the Faith, Manav, Red Room Reeves, and many Red Room volunteers.
Red Room is a space to celebrate deep listening, spoken words and creative expression. Most importantly, Red Room is a listening community. The world needs us to be something bigger than ourselves. Human being needs to be part of a community.
“Have you participated in a community?”“Have you volunteered for a group that shares your value and cause?”“What can I contribute today?”
I encourage people to start their own movement if they are passionate and serious about something. The best way to achieve this is to join a movement you believe in by being a volunteer first. This might be the best way to become part of a community. Unwavering generosity brings us closer together.
Because of you, the Red Room Volunteers, Red Room flourishes. Because of you, Red Room is a community. Because of you, we are able to create in a space that is welcoming.
Ping Chu is the co-founder of the Red Room.
Red Room Reflections: Stage Time & Wine 77
Stage Time & Wine rarely starts on time; it starts early. What I mean to say is, what I’ve come to consider Stage Time & Wine, and the Red Room community, extends itself beyond the hours between when the emcee enters the stage and the last performer exits. Red Room’s 77th Stage Time & Wine confirmed this view.
Roma Mehta and Sharon Landon laugh while preparing the stone soup for Red Roomers
At 5:30, volunteers for the night already bustled through the space, carrying trays of foods, stirring pots and chatting over tidying up. At the front of the room, Vicky Sun perched on a stool with her guitar. She looked over to Addison, who having spent the last thirty seconds muttering “check” and counting in different tones into the mic, had already settled into his post. After receiving the thumbs up, Sun began to croon into the microphone, a warm bluesy melody expanded and filled the room. Volunteers in the back responded with a smattering of applause and affirmative whoops.
Deshara tiptoes and skips playfully through the crowd
The room had filled well before Trevor Tortomasi, Red Room’s emcee for the night, recommended sitting on the ever present red carpets. People had clustered in groups, a mix of friends and new attendees, and had commenced sharing their lives with each other. 6:30 came and everyone finally settled and hushed. In truth the night was filled with curiousity rousing and empathy engendering moments.
Max Power positioned himself on the stool and, with his usual dry wit, launched himself into a world full of vivid imagery; a world which left the reader disoriented but wanting. Addison Eng added levity to the night with a performance that meshed acting and musicianship. Li Wei Seh sang songs from the collective memory of his tribe. Deshara, and a friend she pulled from the audience, introduced a playful children’s drumming game. Each of them ran and skipped and spun around a chest, intermittently slapping the wood and humming in an otherworldly voice. “We just practiced for maybe twenty, minutes before so, actually, we felt quite nervous today,” an out-of-breath Deshara convinced following a healthy applause.
A ukelele player, Joyce Wolf, shared in Deshara’s nervousness. Nevertheless, she thanked “the Red Room for creating [a] space to be able to perform and feel comfortable” before strumming and singing with a friend. Many other performers seemed to feel similarly, because they felt comfortable enough to impart personal and social memories with a room filled largely with people they’d only just encountered.
Fiona read Bei Ying, or my father’s back, a poem written by Zhu Zi-Qing. The resounding image in the poem is of a father walking away from a son. Before she began, she revealed that she had lost her own father two months ago. A friend embraced her when she finished, and other audience members outstretched their arms and extended affection.
Marcus begins his spoken word performance
Another performer, Alex, shared his own personal loss. During his five minutes, Red Roomers went through the five stages of grief in a tragi-comic story which centered on the loss of a fiancee. Alexandra Gilliam reads original poetry which also focused on loss, heartbreak and abandonment. Her words settle upon the audience like a several blankets, cocooning them in layers of meaning.
As the night draws to a close, our opening performer, Max Power, introduces a friend. He asks the crowd if he can share, though he has arrived late. Applause follows him to the front of the room, where he composes himself for a moment, before beginning a spoken word poem on systemic racism and the community he grew up in.
Though the mics were turned off after Marcus’ performance, Red Roomers continued to mingle and create well beyond the official end time. For many of us, Stage Time & Wine was more than a single event, or an open mic night, or a night of poetry and music. Stage Time Night was a facet of a community which flowed through all Red Room events and beyond them, spilling over past the microphone and the stage.
by Leah List
Editor for the Red Room
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 .
Stage Time and Juice XVI: Marching to the Beat of a Different Drummer
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
— Henry David Thoreau
And different drummers we heard indeed. Many different drummers. And people of all shapes and sizes with shakers and tambourines and wooden frogs and other things that I don’t even know the name of, moving to the rhythm of the same beat. Afterward, Sue said, “(It) made me realize that I really miss doing music with kids, since I feel about 5 most of the time!”
There were poets being celebrated as well. Kai introduced us to a melancholy American poet, Robinson Jeffers, who, in 1925, mourned the demise of America. I recited a poem written by Shel Silverstein that complained about being inseparably joined together. Nicole read a poem by Kenn Nesbitt elaborating the shortcomings of her smartphone. Perhaps the Juicers will now have the impression that poetry is only for complaining.
Maggie asked us some riddles, most of which we were able to guess. Later, Michael accompanied her on the conga drums as she sang “Dream Keeper.”
The fiery redheaded 5-year-old puppet, Mimi, told us about her boyfriend who is so overwhelmed with emotion for her that he is unable to actually be with her. She also talked a little with Jennifer Joy about what a bummer it is to be so cute that everyone wants to touch her.
The envoy, Peter, from the British Ministry of Silly Walks, explained that one could have a fine career developing silly walks. The audience was then encouraged to try their best. Five exceptionally silly individuals were awarded presents from the two lollipop girls, Charlotte and Bea, who happen to make all-natural, home made lip balms, surprise soaps, and epsom bath salts. (For those of you who were not silly enough to get some, you can always order your own from Mila Earth Body Care.
A young newcomer sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Charlotte ended the show on a serious note by asking us some tough questions about what we would rather be.
And that’s what you missed at Stage Time and Juice!