'Hot, new and fresh'

Tonight the Novel Hall launches its annual Novel Dance Series and as expected, artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) has chosen an outstanding line-up that will leave Taipei audiences with a lot to talk about for quite a while.

The theme of this year's series is "Men Dancing," the second time that the focus has been on male dancers since the series began in 2000. Making a return to the Novel stage will be Japan's Saburo Teshigawara, Britain's Akram Khan and Thailand's Pichet Klunchun, while another familiar face, abeit from a different setting, will be former Cloud Gate Dance Theater member Cheng Tsung-lung (鄭宗龍).

While the other performers — Jyrki Karttunen, Sang Jijia and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui — may be less well known to Taipei audiences, they are becoming familiar names in their own countries and on the world's stages.

When I asked Elaine Huang (黃麗宇), Novel Hall's public relations manager, why they were doing a second series on men, she said she didn't know, and Lin had not explained why. Akram and Saburo, however, were key to Novel's dance series, she said, and Lin wanted to keep them in front of Taipei audiences.

"For the others, like the "Fairy" from Finland, and the three Asians [next weekend], represent the younger generation of choreographers … so it's easy to collect all the male choreographers into a series," Huang said.

"Hot, new and fresh," were the key words to describe these artists, she said.

Karttunen, who will be performing this weekend, began his dance career with the Helsinki City Theatre Dance Company, where he danced from 1989 to 1993 and is a founding member of the Finnish artistic cooperative Nomadi Productions. He began choreographing in 1995, although he says he didn't really feel like he had become a choreographer until 1998, when he created digital duende.

In his 12 years as a choreographer, Karttunen has become known for his humor and for the ability to mix light-heartedness with darker reflection, both of which will be on display in his 2002 work Keiju (fairy in Finnish).

Keiju tells the story of a turquoise-clad, marigold-crowned fairy who must search for his ideal world after being catapulted into a timeless dimension between the world of flowers and everyday life — and losing the ability to fly. Thanks to the magic created by multi-media projections onto four proscenium-to-floor length screens, the audience will see Karttunen dancing with himself or multiple images of himself (each of which is clad in a slightly different color scheme, with differing flower headdresses to boot).

"The idea was to go into the color spectrum when lined up — from turquoise to lime green — to show different aspects of myself and how I was so lonely that I had to keep myself company," he said at a press conference yesterday.

However, since folktales don't explain about the sex of fairies or how they reproduce, his costume and make-up had to be a mix of male and female, he said.

While Keiju sounds like it might be a folktale for children, Karttunen was actually grappling with very adult themes when he created the work in the fall of 2001.

"There was a big feeling of loss in autumn 2001 after 9/11 ... [The question was] could I do something to comfort people?" he said. " I wanted to do a fairy tale for adults — but also questioning whether a piece could only be about happiness or the quest for it."