"Twenty Years of Taiwan in Avignon: Soft Power on Someone Else's Terms" — Taiwan Insight / University of Nottingham
I published a new opinion piece in Taiwan Insight, the online academic magazine of the University of Nottingham’s Taiwan Research Hub, marking twenty years of Taiwanese presence at the Festival Off d’Avignon.
The article traces that trajectory — eight Taiwanese companies invited by Bernard Faivre d’Arcier in 1998, annual participation by the Taiwan Cultural Centre in Paris at the Off since 2007, then guest-of-honour status in 2024 — in order to ask a less celebratory question: who decides what Taiwan gets to show. In 2026, out of some fifty applications, four companies were selected, all contemporary dance, with the choice made jointly with venue directors (La Condition des Soies, Les Hivernales).
My argument is that the binding constraint is not Beijing’s objections to how Taiwan is labelled, but the criteria of French programmers. Language appears nowhere in the stated criteria, yet it filters: favouring work “able to perform in a foreign context” privileges the non-verbal and screens out theatre, which would need translation. The outcome reads as a series of artistic judgements rather than as a filter. I argue that Taiwan’s cultural diplomacy would gain from pursuing credibility rather than legitimacy alone, and point to co-production schemes such as the Villa Formose (2023), which allow co-authorship rather than mere display.