Taiwan Week brings 3 bold performances to Prague Fringe Festival

A solo show about dementia, a female-driven Macbeth inspired by Rodin, and a magician unpacking his childhood onstage. It’s not exactly your standard night out in Prague, but that is the point.

That mix arrives as part of a new “Taiwan Week” at this year’s Prague Fringe Festival, taking place May 25 to 30 at Divadlo Inspirace. The showcase brings three Taiwanese companies together under one program, pairing contemporary performance with a softer cultural layer of Taiwanese tea and traditional snacks served on site.

As festival director Steve Gove put it, “Taiwanese artists bring an unmistakable creative voice. Their work often combines extraordinary physical precision with profound engagement in contemporary issues. That balance of tradition, innovation, and urgency reflects exactly the spirit that fringe festivals celebrate.”

Tickets for all performances are CZK 300 each and can be purchased via the Prague Fringe website. Explore the unique program below.

A deeply personal solo performance inspired by artist Suzanne Hsuan Szu-Min’s experience caring for her mother through dementia and depression. Through minimal staging and expressive movement, this work by Bandone Productions is a physical exploration of memory, identity, and emotional exhaustion. 

Szu-Min turns lived experience into movement-led storytelling. Rather than relying on dialogue or exposition, the piece builds its meaning through gesture, repetition, and silence. The result is a portrait of connection under strain, where what is remembered and what is lost are constantly negotiating space.

Three performers from different generations, including a dancer, an actress, and a Butoh artist, share the stage in a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth through the sculptural world of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell. 

Rather than following traditional narrative structure, this production from Shinehouse Theatre builds meaning through movement, tension, and contrast, with each performer bringing a distinct physical vocabulary to the stage.

What emerges is less a retelling of Macbeth than a layered study of desire, power, and collapse, filtered through a distinctly female perspective and expressed almost entirely through physical performance.

Created by artistic director Lin Lu-Chieh, this poetic solo performance blends sleight-of-hand with coming-of-age storytelling, tracing the uneasy space between childhood ambition and adult identity. Rather than presenting tricks as standalone moments, the staging folds them into the emotional structure of the piece, so that what the audience sees is constantly shaped by misdirection and reveal.

What starts as a gradually unfolding performance shifts into something more reflective, where illusion becomes a way of exploring how identity is constructed, performed, and sometimes deliberately obscured.