The worlds of contemporary dance and fashion will collide this weekend as the Shangchi Move Theatre (崎動力劇場) takes to the City Stage as part of the 2007 Taipei Arts Festival with the premiere of Walk Faster! (走快一點，型男!).
The Shangchi Move Theatre is the newly formed company of 30-year old Taiwanese choreographer/dancer Sun Shang-chi (孫尚綺), a senior dancer with the Nuremburg Dance Theater, who reached out to creative people in the worlds of dance, film, theater and fashion in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Europe to help bring his ideas to the stage.
Sun has said that he started thinking of how the street styles of young people varied from country to country - something he observed as he bounced back and forth between Taiwan and Germany over the past six years - and what this says about each country. Young Germans and other Europeans seem to dress to personify their individuality while young Taiwanese appear obsessed with brands and labels, he said.
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF SHANGCHI MOVE THEATRE
He was also interested in how people relate to their clothing and to materials and texture and how that affects the way they move. Are your clothes confining or liberating? Do they hide or display?
Then Sun began thinking about fashion shows with their carefully choreographed moves that are so at odds with how people move in real life. So he started tinkering with the idea of turning models' catwalk struts into dance movements. To add authenticity, Sun recruited Hong Kong choreographer Frankie Ho (何靜茹), who has built a reputation as a fashion-show choreographer over the past decade.
While Ho may not be that well-known to Taipei audiences, others on the creative team Sun recruited for Walk Faster, Including long-time Cloud Gate Dance Theater set designer Austin Wang (王孟超) and costume designer Elvis Tseng (曾天佑), who created the costumes for Cloud Gate's Wind Shadow last year. Punk Chan (陳光榮), whose work has been heard in films such as the Infernal Affairs (無間道) trilogy has created a score that mixes opera with elecronica for the show.
Audience members will be invited to join the dancers on the catwalk.
Shangchi Move Theatre's Walk Faster will be performed tomorrow at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2:30pm at Taipei City Stage (社教館城市舞台), 25, Bade Rd Sec 3, Taipei (台北市八德路三段25號).
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