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.
By 1971, heroin and opium use among US troops fighting in Vietnam had reached epidemic proportions, with 42 percent of American servicemen saying they’d tried opioids at least once and around 20 percent claiming some level of addiction, according to the US Department of Defense. Though heroin use by US troops has been little discussed in the context of Taiwan, these and other drugs — produced in part by rogue Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies then in Thailand and Myanmar — also spread to US military bases on the island, where soldiers were often stoned or high. American military policeman
Under pressure, President William Lai (賴清德) has enacted his first cabinet reshuffle. Whether it will be enough to staunch the bleeding remains to be seen. Cabinet members in the Executive Yuan almost always end up as sacrificial lambs, especially those appointed early in a president’s term. When presidents are under pressure, the cabinet is reshuffled. This is not unique to any party or president; this is the custom. This is the case in many democracies, especially parliamentary ones. In Taiwan, constitutionally the president presides over the heads of the five branches of government, each of which is confusingly translated as “president”
An attempt to promote friendship between Japan and countries in Africa has transformed into a xenophobic row about migration after inaccurate media reports suggested the scheme would lead to a “flood of immigrants.” The controversy erupted after the Japan International Cooperation Agency, or JICA, said this month it had designated four Japanese cities as “Africa hometowns” for partner countries in Africa: Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. The program, announced at the end of an international conference on African development in Yokohama, will involve personnel exchanges and events to foster closer ties between the four regional Japanese cities — Imabari, Kisarazu, Sanjo and
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7 In 1899, Kozaburo Hirai became the first documented Japanese to wed a Taiwanese under colonial rule. The soldier was partly motivated by the government’s policy of assimilating the Taiwanese population through intermarriage. While his friends and family disapproved and even mocked him, the marriage endured. By 1930, when his story appeared in Tales of Virtuous Deeds in Taiwan, Hirai had settled in his wife’s rural Changhua hometown, farming the land and integrating into local society. Similarly, Aiko Fujii, who married into the prominent Wufeng Lin Family (霧峰林家) in 1927, quickly learned Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) and
RSS