Making Dreams Come True--Behind-the-Scenes Festival Heroes

As spring draws to a close in April, people start bringing out over 100 quilts to dry in the sun at National Ilan University, the international dormitory for the festival. Ilan's farmers' associations are designing special menus according to the cultural backgrounds and religions of the countries of the invited troupes. College students are being interviewed for jobs as goodwill ambassadors and festival workers.

"The children's festival is already part of the rhythm of many people's lives in Ilan," says the chief organizer of the sixth festival and current senior executive officer of the Council for Cultural Affairs, Jean Lee.

The high net, suspended in the heavens, sends a chill down everyone's spine. With joyous shrieks and collisions, it's the very spirit of the children's festival.

Day in, day out

"In April the battle is at full pitch. By May there are no more weekends, and by June there's no difference between day and night," is how senior workers describe the work atmosphere and the superhuman spirit of the workers.

After the curtain falls on the one-and-half month festival in mid-August, shushing the sounds of children playing in the water and ending the warm atmosphere of the children's folk performances, it's time to pack everything up. All the heavy-duty stage equipment and all the exhibits have to be packed away, while all the collected toys have to be filed. There are over a hundred categories of expenses to audit and pay out also. The clean-up operation lasts until early October.

When the mopping-up comes to an end in September and October, it's immediately time to start allocating anew work on next year's festival. No sooner have this year's performing troupes been seen off than the troupes to be invited for the next year are being contacted. Meanwhile requests for sponsorship from the public relations department of various businesses all have to be sent by the end of the year.

Following that, from January to April, all the committee groups are in unending discussions, drawing up plans, deciding on feasible possibilities and holding general meetings every two weeks. "With the festival now in its tenth year, many activities are already well established and the overall preparatory committee only meets twice a year. In the first year it met as many as seven times!" says festival veteran Wang Man-hua.

After the preparatory committee has made its decisions, orders are placed for promotional materials, memorabilia, and designs and plans for the exhibition center and for water activities. By June, lights are ablaze all night at the Lan-Yang Foundation, where on average the workday lasts more than 13 hours.

Going through this kind of planning all year, centering on the children, organizers have come up with novel approaches to the four themes of the festival-performances, exhibitions, games, and having fun in the water. The International Council of Organizations for Folklore Festivals and Folk Art is the driving force behind invitations to international troupes. The ages of performers all range from eight to 18. With their innocent smiles and loveable gangly limbs, it's hard not to be infected with the joy of the occasion.

Meticulous planning has given the children's festival a considerable reputation overseas, but the behind-the-scenes price is not to be underestimated. "This year, apart from issuing ten extra whitening masks, we're definitely going to have to make records of people's weight," quips the head of Ilan County Cultural Affairs Bureau, Chen Teng-chin, to the festival work team. The reason: after every year's celebrations everybody has not only been burnt to a crisp by the sun but they've also lost weight.

The children's performing troupes from all over the world, have opened up a world of international vistas for the people of Ilan. From left to right: a Paraguayan dancer, a Japanese whipping tops performer, Paraguayan dancers, and Yugoslav dancers.

Keeping New Year at home

In the ten years since the festival began, from the time of its first leader, Lin Te-fu, to the current head, Chen Teng-chin, everyone involved has been laid waste with all the work. But they've persisted throughout: "We have to do the festival ourselves; we're definitely not farming it out to outsiders."

"Ilan has its own idealistic way of doing things. We worry private companies won't be able to meet our quality standards. So why not do it ourselves and establish some knowhow?" says Chen. Over the past ten years, the composition of practically all the work units has changed, but they still rely on standards and procedures that have been passed down, securely establishing them as Taiwan's No. 1 festival brand.

"It's no different from Chinese New Year. You've got to kill the chicken and the duck and steam your own rice cake if you want to cook up a real New Year atmosphere. If you get a ready-made New Year's dinner delivered, it always feels like something is missing in the atmosphere!" says Jean Lee. What's more, if the work was farmed out, the children's festival would just become a "business" or some kind of "event," with no deep investment of emotions.

The annual summer children's festival this year grandly entered its tenth anniversary, touching children's hearts, and with its water games becoming a trade-mark event that is much anticipated.

Local coordination

Under a policy that has been pursued consistently by three county commissioners over 20 years of putting culture first, the children's festival has become one avenue for cultured, well educated people to take. This can be seen in particular in the 1996 announcement by then county commissioner Yu Shyi-kun that Ilan would prepare to be an "orchid blooming for 200 years" by the year 2000. The "Children's Dreamland"-one major theme of that project-was the origin of the festival.

The Ilan County Cultural Center (later to become the Cultural Affairs Bureau) set up a taskforce to organize the event. But there was not enough manpower to swing open the gates. Almost as if all that was needed was the will, the Ilan inhabitants were joined, to their surprise, by idealistic youngsters who returned to their northeastern homeland to throw in their weight.

The person known as "Mother Wang," is Wang Man-hua-one of the founders of the ten-year-old festival. She was a housewife in Taipei for 20 years. But because her children had left home for college and her husband was doing business in China, at the invitation of an Ilan friend she joined the festival work team, despite her ripe old age. At first, having not worked for so long, she didn't know how to use a computer, or even a photocopier. However, because of her experience working in a communications company in her youth, plus her warm and gracious temperament, she became the main spokesperson for the Lan-Yang Foundation.

The children's performing troupes from all over the world, have opened up a world of international vistas for the people of Ilan. From left to right: a Paraguayan dancer, a Japanese whipping tops performer, Paraguayan dancers, and Yugoslav dancers.

Amazing interns

Every year in April there is a fiercely competed "exam." More than 500 candidates fight it out for 222 places. The exam is divided into a written test, a spoken test and a physical. This is the children's festival intern exam. It doesn't matter if they are guides for the foreign troupes or working in the festival grounds-all interns, without exception, have to have basic English ability. Subjects tested include introducing Ilan's culture and geography, and also running 100 meters with a big pack of mineral water on their shoulders.

Although the pay is only around NT$95 per hour, Ilan-born students from colleges all over Taiwan heed the call and rush back to their native home to pitch in. Last year, Chen Teng-chin extended the internship program down to a lower age group, seeking out 30 county senior primary school students and middle school students to work as festival cub reporters. He invited teachers to direct them in putting out a daily festival newspaper, collecting it all together at the end and producing a special "Achievement Anthology."

"If the festival was farmed out to outsiders, that kind of reaching out to the local community would be impossible," says Chen.

Many of the enthusiastic festival interns will, in days to come, become members of festival work units themselves. In 1999, while studying in the graduate school of Spanish of Fu Jen Catholic University, Wu Meng-chen, who is proficient in English, Spanish, Italian and French, volunteered her services in a letter to the then head of the Cultural Affairs Bureau and became an intern performance-troupe guide at the festival. In 2001 she formally joined the work team and took on the challenging responsibility of inviting international performing troupes to participate.

"Before the performing troupes have arrived, I don't dare to say how many of them will be coming," says Wu. For example, one year, because the government of one African country was taking strict precautions against the trafficking of children, the troupe was forbidden to come. In June some troupes promise they're still coming and then at the last minute the situation changes. Events that so much planning went into have to be reorganized. It's enough to drive one to distraction.

The children's performing troupes from all over the world, have opened up a world of international vistas for the people of Ilan. From left to right: a Paraguayan dancer, a Japanese whipping tops performer, Paraguayan dancers, and Yugoslav dancers.

Playing, not being played

The festival also has a brainstorming team who seem to spend their time just picking their teeth. Says the head of this creative unit, Chang Chin-yu: "We're just a bunch of good-for-nothing layabouts." In actual fact, this group of people from all walks of life are the originators of new kinds of water games every year.

In the beginning, they used the principle of a carwash to come up with a "water maze," which could be said to be Taiwan's earliest spa. Using the pesticide sprayers farmers carry on their backs, they developed a mobile water-gun competition for families. Fathers had to carry tanks of water on their backs, while the children attacked the other families with water guns. They even put water beds in the pools, creating a "reverse water maze," in which people would naturally hit against each other on the beds.

"The spirit of the children's festival is that of us playing with toys, not the mechanical style of letting toys play with us. And apart from individual play, we really want to create opportunities for everybody to play together," says Chang Chin-yu. As well as water games, public service facilities are also the responsibility of the creative team. With the aim of providing better service, they use the cooling water from the park's electrical generators to provide the 140 changing rooms with hot water. So as not to pollute the playing pools, they put planks across the lawns, and cover the planks with soft artificial turf, thus preventing swimmers carrying mud into the pools. Their attention to detail even stretches to separating the kitchen waste for composting and pigfeed.

Besides the exciting water activities, every year there are exhibitions promoting such things as puppet shows, illustrated children's stories, recordings, and robots, making the children's festival all the more lively.

Don't focus on the numbers

Despite the increasing popularity of festivals, and the increasing competition over attendance levels, the organizers of the children's festival, where visitor numbers have already reached the 900,000 mark, have absolutely no interest in snatching the one-million crown.

"The county commissioner is constantly saying we're not to make attendance levels a promotion device or an objective, because what we're pursuing is simply quality," says Chen Teng-chin. Having invited experts and scholars to assess the situation, the children's festival organizers are aware that in a county of just 460,000 people the ideal number of festivalgoers is around 800,000. More than that will be an excessive assault on the local lifestyle. The fear is that traffic jams will not only be restricted to the area close to Chinshui Park, the festival venue. Ideally the daily number of visitors should be controlled at between 25,000 and 30,000. When visitor numbers exceed 50,000 on weekends it is hard to focus on quality and this in itself becomes negative promotion.

Even though, for the duration of the festival, the park area has at least 300 staff on hand, in the early days there were two accidents in which children drowned. For that reason, in the deeper areas where the boats are moored, a warning line has to be drawn, and professional lifeguards are on hand, vigilant and ever alert.

Furthermore, there are the long queues for the toilets, which on a hot day can leave people feeling frustrated. To guide people away from those toilets where the crowds are biggest, a large number of interns acting as guides hold aloft placards reading "toilets, this way." This could also be said to be one of the festival's special sights. Overcrowding is definitely the biggest challenge for the children's festival. For this reason there is a big gap between ticket prices for ordinary days and holidays, so as to deliberately adjust the number of visitors.

"You can only fit so many oranges in a basket. Any more and you'll crush them to a pulp," says Chen Teng-chin. From the children's festival, the "Happy Ilan" Chinese New Year celebrations in Chiaohsi and Ilan's Green Expo, the Ilan County Government's festivities have evolved into a high-quality cultural industry.

The children's performing troupes from all over the world, have opened up a world of international vistas for the people of Ilan. From left to right: a Paraguayan dancer, a Japanese whipping tops performer, Paraguayan dancers, and Yugoslav dancers.