It will take more than a typhoon to deter Taiwanese dancer/choreographer Allen Yu (余能盛). His Chamber Ballet Taipei was to perform his latest works at Metropolitan Hall, beginning tonight, for three performances. Typhoon Morakot’s approach forced him to reschedule and tonight’s show has been moved to Sunday night.
Yu is deputy ballet director and choreographer at the Opera House in Graz, Austria, but he has come back to Taiwan for the past three summers to stage full-length narrative ballets. As the first Taiwanese ballet dancer to go to Europe, he has long felt he had a duty to give back to this country, since his studies at the Royal Ballet School in The Hague were financed by a government scholarship.
His mission is to raise the standards for local ballet dancers, and it is an uphill battle. It means making a trip to Taipei in early spring to hold auditions and then spending his summer vacation in rehearsals. As usual, he has brought several guest artists with him so that local dancers can learn from them.
“Ardee [Philippines-born Ardee Dionisio] is from my company in Graz. Eve [Andre] is from the Estonia National Opera ballet, as is Sergei Upkin,” Yu said in a telephone interview on Tuesday.
The fourth guest artist is Roman Novitzky, a soloist with the Slovak National Theatre, while Jochem Hochstenbach, vice music director of National Theater in Karlsruhe, Germany, will conduct the Taipei City Orchestra for this weekend’s performances.
Instead of the full-length ballets he has produced in the past, Yu wanted to do something different, a mixed program that examines the dialogue between music and dance in different generations.
For the first ballet, Yu chose Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 for Strings in G Major, more commonly known Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music) and Mozart’s Symphony No. 25. For the second half, he picked Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring).
He insists a combination of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Igor Stravinsky is not as strange as it seems.
“I chose them because Mozart is 18th century, the best cultural time in Europe, the Baroque era. Stravinsky is the best of modern 20th century,” Yu said. “Two generations, two different styles of dance.”
Yu said he deliberately chose Baroque pieces that people are familiar with because he wanted to show Mozart’s connection to the world of dance. Mozart wrote many pieces for court dances, including the minuet, and European court dances were the beginnings of ballet, he said. The dancers’ costumes and wigs are appropriate to the era.
The jump across the centuries from Mozart to Stravinsky’s Sacre is pretty broad. But Sacre had a seminal influence on modern ballet, both musically and in Vaslav Nijinksy’s original choreography. Yu said his choreography was inspired by the changes in Taipei society in the past few decades.
“Sacre du Printemps has 14 sections. The first eight sections are the ceremony of the gods, the rest is the girl [the sacrifice] dancing to her death for the gods. In Taiwan now, everyone is so busy, hectic, the traffic is so loud. You work the whole day but when you go home there is so much noise, you want to sit in the quiet,” he said.
But homes in Taipei, he said, have become like prisons with bars on the windows and steel cages encasing balconies.
“There is a jail in your home, but even the whole city is a jail,” he said.
“Taiwan is a high-tech society but the people are getting colder. No one writes letters, they just sit at their computers sending messages and buying things,” he said. “[In] the first eight sections I try to show what I feel about life in Taiwan.”
“In this society people don’t understand each other, we’re all orphans ... I don’t give any answers, I just want people to figure it out for themselves,” he said.
“When we did this piece in Tainan [last weekend], the people were really crazy for it, they loved it. I hope the audiences in Taipei will understand,” he said.
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