The seventh month of the lunar calendar marks what's known as the “Ghost Month” in Taiwan. This is a combination of the Ghost Festival—which is the birthday celebration of the Earthly Official from Three Great Emperor-Officials of Taoism, the Yulanpen Festival—which is a Buddhist event to save souls from the lower realms, and the Confucian concept of filial piety. These ideas crossed the sea to Taiwan with the Han Chinese, accumulated over time, and have become important folk cultural heritage. In the Cultural Landscape Research Project of the Water Lantern Festival in Yilan Old Town, the researcher investigated the current situation of the Water Lantern Festival in Yilan from the perspectives of spatial developmentand ritual preservation and revitalization. The work Floating Flowers by Po-Cheng Tsai, artistic director of B.Dance, was inspired by the imagery of the water lanterns and brought this piece of Taiwanese culture onto the international stage.

 

The most important ritual of the Ghost Festival is the Pudu ceremony, where a green-faced, tusked, two-horned Ghost King (also known as the "Venerable Great Lord" or "Da Shi Ye") stands in front of the sacrificial offerings. This became the subject of writer Gustave Cheng's Set Off on An Adventure: Da Shi Ye in Flames. Emerging choreographer Hung-Chung Lai turned the belief and tradition of Da Shi Ye into a motive for his work, Nai 1.

 

Ghost kings are not alone in the vast underworld. Novelist Ching-Yao Ho spent three years investigating and compiling a record of demons and ghosts unique to Taiwan over the centuries, A Three-hundred-year Record of Taiwanese Supernatural Monsters. The mysteriousness and uniqueness of these folk legends or ghost stories became a source of inspiration for many artists. Tainan in the Night by Fevervine Dance Theatre uses three village tales from Tainan as the foundation and explores new aspects of the stories through field research. Shinehouse Theatre's Midsummer Night's Chat: The Gap II combines ghost stories and exit games to immerse the audience in the darkness of a ghostly night. In addition to local performances and creations, One Player Short Ensemble also collaborated with Singapore's The Theatre Practice in Earth Project Exchange Series: Ghost, which used the theme of "drifting" and ghost stories as material for a cross-border exchange between actors and actresses.

 

Whether ghosts exist or not, the clever design of the writer-director allows for a dialogue between ghosts and humans. Greenray Theatre Company's Human Condition I is a story about a deceased grandmother who possesses the body of her granddaughter and returns to the world of the living, fulfilling a wish that spans two lifetimes. Tainaner Ensemble's GHOSTs unearths hidden family secrets in a dialogue between the living and the dead, piecing together a family story. Chef in Style features a chef possessed by his mother's spirit, where the misunderstanding between mother and son is cleared up in the process of re-creating his mother's flavorful dishes.

The unknown and invisible nature of ghosts has given rise to diverse beliefs and cultural traditions, as well as prompted infinite artistic conceptions of "ghosts".

 

 

Further readings and related websites:
 

 

 

*Translator: Linguitronics