These go to 11

One of the staples for temple celebrations are the bùdàixì, or glove puppet, performances. Several television serials featuring elaborately dressed dolls of legendary characters performing acrobatic kung-fu scenes attest to the international popularity of these shows. The traveling show variety usually sets up a stage facing the front of a temple from across the street. It’s a rectangular cube, a little less than four meters wide, about three high and a meter or so deep. The bottom two-thirds of the façade is usually bright red, atop of which the actual “stage” stands and where the puppets can be seen. As opposed to a manipulator operating a marionette from above, these puppeteers are required to stand behind the façade and hold the puppets above their heads during the performance.

At both sides of the stage stand large speakers that any roadie would hate to carry but love to hear. In order for the puppeteers to hear the prerecorded dialogue and time their performance to it, these amplifiers are at their highest settings. Quite literally, the gods in, above and around the temple, as well as those down the street and around the corner can hear every word. What amazed me, and still does, are the human audiences sitting only a few meters away from these ear-crushing sound systems.

And it’s not just bùdàixì shows. Before VHS and Betamax made movie viewing part of home entertainment, kung-fu reel-to-reel movies, often with Taoist characters, were shown to neighborhood congregations in front of a temple for the gods’ enjoyment as part of its holy day celebrations. Little kids in shorts and tank tops munching on slabs of blood-rice cakes smothered with hot sauce sat on plastic stools and stared at a jerry-rigged screen hanging between two trees. At school the next day, they were probably unable to follow the lesson because they were partially deaf.

Funeral procession usually have a sound truck (or two or three, depending on how much you want to show off the family’s wealth), a flatbed that has a gazebo-like structure built on it with man-size speakers blaring out the sobs, wails and songs of the paid mourner/singer. Their approach can be heard half a kilometer away, usually drowning out the marching band playing “Auld Lang Syne”, Taiwan’s funeral dirge.

Last week, the wife dragged me along with one of her friends to a sight-seeing hike around the Hutoupi Reservoir to admire some yellow flowering trees. At most of these public functions in Taiwan, there is a raffle to entice more participants to come out, this time being for a few mini-iPads. After the hike, as we waited for the drawing, munching on octopus-ink sausages, the sound guys just to the left of a small stage fiddled with the system, playing ABBA at full volume. You probably could have heard “Waterloo” from across the lake. To start off the ceremonies, the MC, an attractive woman in a frilly black strap-less mini-skirt screeched greetings that had me wincing from twenty meters away. A local music teacher and a few of his students took to the stage and began their repertoire with “Sukiyaki”, that Japanese song famous in the US in the early 60’s. However, their version used an èrhú, that two-stringed fiddle old men play in the park and reminds me of alley cats in heat. Luckily, we able to pull back another five meters, but the main crowd of onlookers, a mere three meters away from the speakers, sat pleasantly on their stools enjoying the show, only occasionally leaning toward each other’s ears to shout something.

So, here’s a shout-out to Axel and his May Jam that was just down the road at the same location. It was great to sit back almost fifty yards from the stage on that grassy knoll in the shade of those huge trees and enjoy some good music going to 11.