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.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ!). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a