The National Concert Hall’s Summer Jazz Party started with some classic sounds on Friday night with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans. This six-person ensemble of veteran musicians and young talents delighted a nearly full house with a 90-minute showcase of traditional jazz numbers.
The set began with a rollicking version of Short Dress Gal and a charming rendition of My Sweet Substitute, sung by 77-year-old clarinetist and New Orleans legend Charlie Gabriel. The standard
St James Infirmary was given a folksy vocal treatment by 36-year-
old trumpeter Mark Braud, a nephew of two former Preservation
Hall bandleaders.
Holding the band’s sound together were long-time Preservation Hall pianist Rickie Monie, whose playing has a large gospel footprint, and veteran drummer Ernie Elly, who egged on the band’s joyful syncopation.
But if anyone stole the show, it was Lucien Barbarin, who spent the beginning of the performance quietly driving the band’s two-beat swing on the tuba. He lit up the room when he switched to trombone and vocals on Girl of My Dreams. His animated solos and gravely, cheerful vocals elicited a boisterous response from the audience.
While Preservation Hall is about carrying on tradition, there are also refreshing signs of new blood. The band performed I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire, a torch song made famous by the doo-wop group the Ink Spots, which featured singer Clint Maedgen, whose singing leaned toward a more contemporary jazz vocal style.
The band dedicated the evening’s concert to areas in Taiwan hit by Typhoon Morakot, noting that it was four years ago to the day that Hurricane Katrina struck their hometown.
At times, the Preservation Hall experience couldn’t cut through the austere setting of the National Concert Hall. But the band ended the show on a perfect note: its members marched off the stage while playing their final song, leading the audience in a mini-parade to the lobby, where they posed for photographs and signed autographs for a hundred or so fans, both young and old.
Heroine (迷幻英雌), which ran on Friday and yesterday as part of the Taipei Arts Festival, is testament to the superb conditioning of Taiwanese dancer Su Wen-chi (蘇文琪). Created especially for — and with — her by Belgian choreographer Arco Renz five years ago, it’s a long performance for a single dancer, 60 minutes, and its lighting and sound proved a test for the audience as well on Saturday night at the Wenshan Branch of the Taipei Cultural Center.
The piece begins in total darkness, both on stage and in the theater. Pulsing electronic noise — you couldn’t call it music at this point — filled the air and the audience members’ heads. It was hard to tell how long the first section of total darkness lasted; it seemed at least 10 minutes but was probably much less. Then a flickering image appeared on stage, so fuzzy that you couldn’t quite make out the shape and you didn’t know if your eyes were playing tricks on you.
Slowly the body of a woman, facing the back of a bare stage, became visible, her arms upraised as if held by chains or ropes that she is struggling against. As the light grew, Su finally turned to confront the audience — and confront is the right word, for you felt that this collection of viewers was part of what she is struggling against.
From the initial trembling and tentative moves — the repetitive fingering of an outflung hand, the windmilling of arms, the slow half-bending spirals of the body — her movements gained strength and assertiveness. Su was clad only in a bra and a short, pleated micro-mini, her musculature on full display. Since she barely moved away from the dead center of an eight-mat square, the dance was the movement of her muscles in this confined space rather than the display of her body across spatial lines.
By the end of Heroine, Su is no longer a woman trapped by the confines of light, sound and space, but a woman, exhausted as she may be, exulting her command of her body and her strength in a repetitive series of motions.
The lights go down as Su windmills her arms so fast they become a blur. The audience sat in stunned silence until the lights came back up and Su came out to take her well-deserved bows.
In a question-and-answer session afterwards, Renz described the piece as representing the struggle for freedom, and it certainly is that. Since he created it especially for Su, he said he couldn’t imagine any other dancer performing it, especially not a man. He also said the model for the heroine — like the murmured words used in the sound track — came from the world of video games.
Heroine is a challenging piece, often disturbing, that raises many questions about the confinement of women and why society is comfortable with the idea of a strong woman only within certain frameworks.
The Taipei Arts Festival, of which Heroine is part, has presented a wonderful array of arts and performances. The one disappointment with the festival, which runs through next weekend, is that after rushing from Jingmei to Ximending on Saturday night to catch the video installation Slow Dancing at the Zhongshan Hall plaza, it was not running as advertised until midnight. Since most of the festival’s shows are at sites far from Zhongshan Hall, having a video installation that runs just from 7pm to 9:30pm doesn’t make a lot of sense, since the people most interested in seeing Slow Dancing would be those going to the other shows as well.
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