Reaching out for an alternative audience

The Dance of Light Troupe performs Percussion Dance. PHOTO: VICO LEE, TAIPEI TIMES

One the longest-standing performing arts festivals in Taiwan, the Crown Art Festival (皇冠藝術節), now in its ninth year, is well known for its promotion of aspiring performance groups and has an eye for promising new talents.

This year, it will present a program of dance and theater performances rich in choreographic innovations and theatrical interpretations of literary works.

Kicking the series of three performances, Dance of Light Troupe (光之舞藝團) -- the first dance group to be composed of visually impaired dancers in Taiwan -- will put up its second full-length production Percussion Dance (擊樂之舞) tonight.

In collaboration with Dance Works (舞工廠舞團), the performance is the group's first attempt to reach an alternative theater audience.

The next group to go on stage will be the Kaohsiung-based Spring Wind Art Theater (南風劇團). Originally a grass-roots group concerned with presenting a southern Taiwan point of view, Spring Wind has shifted toward experimental

theater in the past two years.

In To Jorge Luis Borges (致波赫士), a tribute to the late Argentine writer who pioneered the magic realism genre, Spring Wind takes passages from Borges' writings, to explore various themes related to present-day life.

Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group (莎士比亞的妹妹們的劇團) will wrap up the festival with Emily Dickinson (艾蜜莉*狄金生), a re-creation of the American female poet's works and diaries. Veteran script writer and director Wei Ying-chuan (魏瑛娟) experiments with the effects of performers' movements on the audience, as she did in Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 2001. The actresses tear down the figurative veil between the stage and the backstage by interacting with the crew backstage.

The first half of Dance of Light Troupe's Percussion Dance will be a showcase of the group's performances last year, when their learned and presented modern dance, tap-dancing, ballroom dancing and Latin dance all in the same year. The second half of the show, also titled Percussion Dance, is their new production -- a fusion of percussion performance, modern dance, jive and tap-dancing that lay bare the sorrow caused by being blind.

For the performance, all the dancers had to learn drumming as beginners. "Sound is a good element to use in blind dancers' performance. We can thus make the best of their sharpened sense of hearing to give their dance movements more precision," said Hao Chia-lung (郝嘉隆), choreographer of Percussion.

A major innovation in Percussion is the playing of blind people's canes. The sound of drumsticks tapping on the canes resonate well with the accompaniment of the dynamic barrel-drumming.