The National Theater is closing out the dance year with a look back at Taiwan’s dance history, featuring the work of three living “national treasures” who have danced, taught and inspired for decades and are still going strong.
Lee Tseg-o (李彩娥) may be 82, but she shows no sign of slowing down. Henry Yu (游好彥), who was the first Asian man to join Martha Graham’s dance troupe (in the 1970s), has been called the “father of modern dance” in Taiwan. Yao Ming-li (姚明麗) is known in Taiwan as the “eternal ballerina.”
Both Lee and Yao trained in Japan, while Yu was a student of famed Taiwanese modern dance teacher Tsai Jui-yueh (蔡瑞月) before leaving Taiwan for Europe and the US to expand his training.
All three choreographed and ran their own companies and several of their works have been revived — or in Yao’s case recreated — for this retrospective program, including Lee’s Spring Breeze and A Suite of Taiwanese Folk Songs. Yao gained fame for choreographing a classic ballet based on the Han Dynasty poem, Peacock Flies to the Southeast, the only piece by her on the program. The four works by Yu on the program include Fisherman and The Hunter and Deer.
At a press conference at the National Theater last month, the trio expressed great surprise that the theater had contacted them and asked them to join the program. They were also delighted that so many people, including former students and dancers, were eager to help them restage their work, much of which was created before videotaping rehearsals or performances became common in Taiwan.
For Lee, dance has always been a family affair, and this weekend’s program will be no different.
Eleven of her family members have been or are dancers, including grandson, Hong Kang-jie (洪康捷), who was last seen dancing in August with his ballerina finance Wu Ching-yin in her production of Le Corsaire.
Hong will partner his grandmother in two of her pieces this weekend, and he said she was an inspiration to him — especially her energy, although perhaps not quite as agile as she was when she was his age.
“She is still an amazing dancer,” he said.
Taiwan has next to no political engagement in Myanmar, either with the ruling military junta nor the dozens of armed groups who’ve in the last five years taken over around two-thirds of the nation’s territory in a sprawling, patchwork civil war. But early last month, the leader of one relatively minor Burmese revolutionary faction, General Nerdah Bomya, who is also an alleged war criminal, made a low key visit to Taipei, where he met with a member of President William Lai’s (賴清德) staff, a retired Taiwanese military official and several academics. “I feel like Taiwan is a good example of
March 2 to March 8 Gunfire rang out along the shore of the frontline island of Lieyu (烈嶼) on a foggy afternoon on March 7, 1987. By the time it was over, about 20 unarmed Vietnamese refugees — men, women, elderly and children — were dead. They were hastily buried, followed by decades of silence. Months later, opposition politicians and journalists tried to uncover what had happened, but conflicting accounts only deepened the confusion. One version suggested that government troops had mistakenly killed their own operatives attempting to return home from Vietnam. The military maintained that the
“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) announced last week a city policy to get businesses to reduce working hours to seven hours per day for employees with children 12 and under at home. The city promised to subsidize 80 percent of the employees’ wage loss. Taipei can do this, since the Celestial Dragon Kingdom (天龍國), as it is sardonically known to the denizens of Taiwan’s less fortunate regions, has an outsize grip on the government budget. Like most subsidies, this will likely have little effect on Taiwan’s catastrophic birth rates, though it may be a relief to the shrinking number of
RSS