Baroque Camerata "Word Painting Formosa" Drama & Lecture Concert

"Word Painting Formosa" is a cross-temporal sound writing with music as its main body. The program starts from four languages—indigenous languages, Hakka, Taiwanese, and Mandarin—and develops into four sets of musical chapters that echo each other. It draws from songs, melodies, and rhythms deeply rooted in Taiwanese life over the past century, re-arranged with classical vocabulary and transformed into works with intricate layers and rigorous structure. This music is not merely adaptation, but a reinterpretation of the cultural memories of Taiwan's diverse ethnic groups, allowing sounds that once flowed through streets, fields, and homes to blossom on the contemporary stage.

Music is like a corridor of time, reflecting Taiwan's historical changes from colonization and turmoil to a democratic society, and also carrying the most genuine human warmth in everyday life. Sixteen cultural codes from different eras are meticulously integrated into four musical chapters, connecting the shared memories and emotional roots of generations. Drama and dance serve as auxiliary yet crucial narrative layers, starting from the perspective of a young person searching for their mother tongue, interspersed between the music, responding to the emotions and imagery carried by the melodies, allowing language, body, and sound to intertwine, shaping the polyphonic, fluid, and three-dimensional "Word Painting Formosa."

This production is also divided into two concert formats: (1) Drama Concert, combining drama and dance elements, using the narrative perspective of a young person who gradually becomes alienated from language and emotion during the pandemic era, embarking on a journey of roots-seeking guided by the sound of their mother's Taiwanese voice, allowing the history and living memories of Taiwan's four major cultural groups to flow and intersect on stage, shaping a polyphonic, richly layered soundscape. (2) Lecture Concert, featuring renowned Taiwanese language expert Professor Lin Ching-hsun (林慶勳) as the main speaker for the lecture concert. Using Taiwanese introductions, he engages in dialogue between musical pieces, using songs to narrate the emotions and stories of Taiwanese people.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime musical feast, a cross-genre concert narrated in Taiwanese, a Fantasia for Taiwanese people.