The audience welcomed the Bejart Ballet Lausanne back to Taipei on Thursday night with whoops — not “bravos” but real whooping and repeated demands for curtain calls. It was an auspicious ending to an evening that had started off more with a whimper than a bang.
The first of the three ballets on the program, L'Oiseau de Feu, company founder and choreographer Maurice Bejart's take on the traditional Russian folktale The Firebird, turned out to be the weakest, despite the occasional dramatic flare.
In Bejart's retelling, there is no prince who rescues an imprisoned princess with the help of the magical firebird, but a group of partisans or revolutionaries whose leader sacrifices himself for the good of the group.
The dance begins with nine dancers dressed in blue-grey pants and jackets, linked together so that they look like extras from 1984 or a factory in the Soviet gulag. They move as a group, looking fierce and determined, before dropping to the floor, writhing and crawling. A red circle of light appears and Domenico Levre rips off his proletarian garb to reveal himself as the red-clad “firebird.”
The others alternately grovel and worship before Levre and warm their hands over him before he sacrifices himself — through a dramatic solo — and the black backdrop is dramatically rent by a red “V” to reveal a second red-unitard-clad man, a phoenix. The phoenix revitalizes the flagging partisans and the piece ends with the phoenix bearing the fallen leader away on his back, flying the group toward freedom, or at least better clothes.
Technically, Levre was good as the leader, flexing his muscles, and executing Bejart's twisting balances, but his fire appeared rather lukewarm. Thierry Deballe as the phoenix had a bit more heat, but overall the ballet was showing its age — it was created in 1970.
Next up was Elton Berg, featuring Stephane Bourhis, Julien Favreau and the incredibly flexible Karline Marion. Bourhis and Favreau wore what looked like small black bathing suits while Marion began in a very-chunky looking short purple unitard, which only served to emphasize the length — and articulate flexibility — of her legs and arms.
They performed the same choreography, first to Alban Berg's Altenberg Lieder op. 4 and then to Elton John's Nikita, which gives one the chance to see what they missed the first time around. I found myself liking the Elton John segment more, perhaps because of the familiarity of the music, but also because the trio seemed a bit more animated.
Marion, Bourhis and Favreau showed just how much a dancer contributes to a choreographer's work, breathing life into an otherwise pedestrian number.
Elton-Berg used to be performed with a fourth dancer as part of the set decoration, standing in the background posing. Obviously nothing has been lost by cutting the dance down to a trio.
Also cut down to traveling size was the final work on the program, L'Amour, la Danse. This “Best of Bejart” anthology premiered last year as a two-hour “greatest hits” retrospective of Bejart's 50-plus years as a choreographer, with excerpts from 12 very diverse works. What Thursday night's audience saw was a one-hour collection from eight ballets.
It began with the 20 dancers on stage, most of them sitting on the floor looking like they were doing their stretches before a class, with the exception of the white-clad Favreau in front, stage left and Kateyrina Shalkina in back, stage right, as Romeo and Juliet. The pair then served as the link between the rest of the segments.
It was interesting to see the excerpt from Heliogable, which is set to the flutes and drums of the traditional music of Chad, with lots of splayed feet and hands (a trademark of Bejart's choreography), moving on all fours and bizarre lifts and couplings. Very other worldly.
Victor Jimenez and Ruth Miro were wonderful in their pas de deux, while Brazilian-born William Pedro almost stole the show with his solo from Und So Weiter, set to a rousing piece of Johann Strauss music (which George Balachine used so effectively in his Stars and Stripes).
But the best was saved for last, with Gil Roman and Elisabet Ros alternating their solos from Brel and Barbaru, before the rest of the company came back out to play with their yellow and orange jersey sarongs that are worn bandolier-style across their chests and can expand to full-body sacks. Ros alternated between forlorn yearning and slinky sexiness, while Roman was also soaring passion and flaring Gallic lover.
L'Amour, la Danse is great because it gives audiences a sampling of Bejart's diverse repertoire, and because it provides an opportunity for the dancers to shine in the various solos and pas de deux.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby