Mother Courage

Bread or Bullet? Compete or Compromise?

Mother Courage, an anti-war classic by Bertolt Brecht, is a collaboration with Colectivo Cuerda Floja from Mexico. The performance takes place at Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park, Yilan, while the industrial architectural style of the hundred-year-old paper factory sets the tone for the staging of the scenes. It combines puppetry, music, dance, and installation art to represent a discourse on survival, and the battlefield becomes the banging storm of gunshots of smoke visualized largely with artifact toys of “war machines,” including sirens, machine guns, centipede machine, brain washer machine, etc. The visual center of the stage is a huge push wagon about 6.5 square meters, and each angle presents a scene. With actors busy in moving around the wagon and moving the wagon around, it symbolizes how the civilians have to take immediate reactions to the war or warlike situations of turmoil and unrest and to find a way to continue their lives. Meanwhile, metaphors such as roses and kites softly and gently transform the cruelty of war and what it has taken away with it, creating a fascinating imagination and aspiration. Mother Courage is an inspiring and encouraging theatrical sketch, which brings peace to those who have died in the war as well as opens up a window for the Taiwanese audience to shift our attention to the global issues beyond the island.

Premiere: Oct 30, 2018, Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park, Yilan
Playwright: Yuan-ken Yu
Director: José Angel Soto (Mexico)