Watching Sheu Fang-yi (許芳宜) is like watching a force of nature. Onstage she is a mass of contradictions: fierce, tender, ephemeral, steadfast, poetic, earthy, fragile, incredibly strong, small but able to make her legs look extra long.
Watching Sheu was what LAFA's (拉芳) 37 Arts production was all about, with choreography that catered to her strengths and charisma. But while it was Sheu who drew the audiences that packed all four performances of LAFA's inaugural season at Novel Hall from Jan. 17 to Jan. 19, the company that she and long-time partner Bulareyaung Pagarlava (Bula, 布拉瑞揚) have formed more than delivered on their promise of a new force in Taiwan's dance world.
Choreographer Sang Ji-jyia's (桑吉加) 10-minute The Duet, set to music by Ryoji Iked, quietly set the pace for the evening. His spare, stripped-down moves made the most of Sheu and partner Chou Shu-yi's (周書毅, of MDans) easy articulation. Chou is always enjoyable to watch and he more than held his own with Sheu.
PHOTO COURTESY OF LAFA
The second piece was a study in black and white, a solo for Sheu from Bula's 2002 The Single Room. Clad in a sheer black negligee-like shift, Sheu approaches her partner, a long table that sits center stage. She dances around it, against it, with it, on it and under it, back-lit for the most part so that it is her silhouette that you are watching, a graceful shadow against an immovable object.
At times the table acts as a ballet bar; other times it is more substantial, as she half lays upon it. She appears incredibly fragile, but that fragility is belied by the strength needed to maintain her balance.
The solo is one of Bula's most balletic pieces and it was a complete contrast to the final work on the program, 37 Arts, a one-two punch that demonstrated his growth as a choreographer.
Once again the table takes center stage as 37 Arts opens, only this time there are three chairs around it. Two young men, clad in huge oversized white T-shirts, take their seats, followed by a similarly clad Sheu. What follows is a rollicking Keystone Cops silent movie battle for a white bottle, first done fast, then repeated in slow motion as if lit by a strobe, all set to a cancan score. Eyes bulge, hair gets pulled, the audience gets the giggles.
Then Huang Ming-cheng (黃明正) enters, clad only in black bathing trunks, and performs a series of acrobatic feats that leaves the audience both cheering and eating out of his hand: handstands, hoop jumps and rope tricks, is there nothing this man can't do?
The slap-stick pace is maintained through the next sequence, set to I love Paris. But before you know it the pace and the mood have shifted. The friendly acrobat has become a menacing figure in a dark duet with Sheu as he grabs her hair, her T-shirt, picks her up and tosses her about.
Huang spins Sheu around much like an adult would play airplane with a child, her body parallel to the ground. But since he is holding only cloth, you find yourself hoping that the material will hold through another performance. They swirl like ice skaters, but there's a sickening edge to the movements. In the end, Sheu, her hair hanging down over her face, twitches and moves like a broken doll. No one is laughing now, the audience sits in dead silence.
Then the curtain is raised, the table is back, and all four dancers come out with their costumes turned into modified clown outfits for a cancan reprise and smiles all around. It was a powerful performance, and a reminder how good Bula is at evoking strong emotions both onstage and among the audience.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s