Dancer/choreographer Sun Chuo-tai (孫梲泰) decided to call his company 8213 Physical Dance Theater (8213肢體舞蹈劇場) because he wanted the name to convey the idea that the company and its productions would be about more than “just dance.”
He wanted to break the mold, blur the boundaries between the dancers and the audience, between dance and theater, between movement and text — as well as examine the connections between them.
Connections, or rather the growing lack of them, are a common theme in Sun’s work. He examines them once again in the company’s newest production, Electron (電子), which began a four-day run at the Guling Street Theater (牯嶺街小劇場) last night.
“Electron ... We wanted to bring down the size of electricity, wanted to give a feeling to the topic, so we chose loneliness,” Sun said on Monday during an interview at the theater. “In society we have a lot of gadgets now, we don’t need to talk to one another. We’re a little more removed today.”
He said he wanted to examine what the proliferation of technology in our everyday life is doing to us.
“Last year my house lost electricity for one week. I thought ‘Oh, my God,’ it’s not convenient. Just to do your normal life — if you want to go to the bathroom, there is no light. I’m also a businessman; I need a cellphone, a laptop, a lot of electronics,” Sun said. “If you forget your cellphone, you panic. These things control your life.”
“We use these things to create a distance. We are connected but you don’t need to see one another. There are ‘no feelings,’ people even break-up by electronic devices. So finally we are at a great distance [from each other]. You close yourself off or use iPods to disconnect,” he said.
The company has been rehearsing the piece for four months, although the project has been in the works for a year. It’s a smaller production than last year’s Boundless: My Bliss (無國界—我的天堂), featuring just Sun, dancer/choreographer Casey Avaunt and an old classmate and colleague of Sun’s from National Taiwan University of the Arts and Taipei Dance Forum, who now goes by the name of Yogi (Chan Tien-chen, 詹天甄).
While Sun said the smaller number of dancers was both a budgetary and a creative decision, it did allow him to add a musician, Chen Shih-hsing (陳世興), for both the rehearsals and the performances.
Sun and Avaunt collaborated on the choreography. A big part of the process, they said, was working out the “why” of each movement.
To reflect electricity, the movements have a lot of vibration and sharp moves, they said, adding that they had to create the basic movements and then find a way to explain to themselves and others “why we are doing this movement.”
“The idea was clear in the beginning, the rehearsals just worked it out,” Avaunt said, though Sun was quick to add that the “working out” meant a lot of negotiating.
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster
Though the total area of Penghu isn’t that large, exploring all of it — including its numerous outlying islands — could easily take a couple of weeks. The most remote township accessible by road from Magong City (馬公市) is Siyu (西嶼鄉), and this place alone deserves at least two days to fully appreciate. Whether it’s beaches, architecture, museums, snacks, sunrises or sunsets that attract you, Siyu has something for everyone. Though only 5km from Magong by sea, no ferry service currently exists and it must be reached by a long circuitous route around the main island of Penghu, with the
RSS