Taichung's Acme Physical Theater premiers latest piece

In the 1970s, dance students returning from abroad gave dance in Taiwan a Western look. In the 1990s, Asian styles were on the rise. Now, a fusion Western and Asian elements holds sway. "A similar trend can be seen in Jackie Chan's movies, in which kungfu is complemented by Western humor," Shih Gee-tze (石吉智), founder and choreographer of Acme Physical Theater (極至體能), told the Taipei Times.

The group's new piece Zhan Zhuang (站樁), a dynamic combination of modern dance and martial arts, premieres in Taichung tomorrow evening.

Acme Physical Theater was the first professional modern dance group to be based in Taichung, where it was established in 1997. It remains the only one. It was both out of love for Taichung, where he had taught dance for years, as well as the competition in Taipei that made Shih choose to stay in central Taiwan.

"Taiwan's cultural development is seriously lopsided," Shih said. "Taipei gets the lion's share of cultural resources as well as the economy. We often say it's a situation of the North getting more consideration than the South in Taiwan (重北輕南). In this saying, the central part is not even mentioned. On the other hand, staging shows in Taipei costs a lot more in terms of money and personnel than a group like ours can afford. And more importantly, resources and venues are limited in Taipei, so the competition can sometimes get complicated. We would rather concentrate on dancing in Taichung for now."

Most of Shih's works are inspired by nature and how humans interact with it. In Feel and Respond, Acme Physical's performance in France last year, Shih combined inspiration from his life in the green city of Taichung with a trip to the magnificent landscape of Australia.

Millennium Ritual, which premiereed in 1999, was about humanity's attempt to communicate with nature. 1998's Three Dynamics is an exploration of how our bodies interact with the forces of nature.

Shih's interest in nature originated in a childhood spent freely painting playground floors, running through rice fields and climbing trees in the Kaohsiung countryside. This intimacy with things natural has Shih relatively unrestrained by academic dance training.

Before Shih left graduate school, his professor Lin Huai-ming told him that he was awful at ballet and awkward at modern dance, but that he caught everyone's eye when it came improvisation. "I guess I learned my style from nature instead of school," Shih said.

As a teenager Shih thought of dance as either a tacky retro ethnic showcase or an embarrassingly effeminate exercise in pink tights. Fortunately, its was not long before a video of French choreographer Maurice Bejart's Spring Ritual changed his mind and set him on the path to choreography.

"I did not realize that dance could be powerful and masculine until then," Shih said. He has since boldly integrated martial arts into his choreography. The externalization of energy flows in the body typical of the practice has distinguished the performances by Acme Physical since its founding. The same can be said of Zhan Zhuang. Meaning "standing like a tree," zhan zhuang is a basic martial arts exercise in which practitioners position themselves on top of a tree stump where they strive to be physically as well as mentally rooted while steadily cultivating their internal energy at the same time.