This has been a busy year for
the Horse Dance Company
(驫舞劇場). The group took its 2008 collaboration Bones to the Joyce Theater in New York City at the beginning of 2009 and then became heavily involved in choreographing the opening ceremony for the Deaflympics in Taipei in September, in the process learning to move 2,000 people around.
The all-male dance collective is marking its fifth year with a piece aptly titled Growing Up (正在長高), a work that has made the company’s veterans confront what it means to be getting older, both physically and emotionally.
In an interview at the company’s studio in Banciao, artistic director Chen Wu-kang (陳武康) said the topic first came up in conversations with colleague Su Wei-chia (蘇威嘉), who’s usually just called “Fat Boy,” when they were in New York.
“Life itself is quicksand. In movies, there is always a branch or a rope to slow you down, but in real life there is no branch or rope,” Chen said. “When you are growing up, it’s very simple, the force of nature keeps you pedaling forward — courage and stupidity are how you deal with it. Why are we so brave and stupid at the same time?”
For Fat Boy, the key to the piece was loss. When he was young, he hoped for three things: to always be able to dance, for his parents to always be healthy, and to grow taller. The reality is he didn’t get much taller, and now his body is telling him that it might no longer be able to do everything he wants.
“I feel my body. It gets harder to keep it strong — doing dance class every day is harder,” he said. “Every project we have different partners, but this time Wu-kang, [Yang] Yu-ming [楊育鳴] and I all feel old.”
One reason the three founding members might be feeling their age is that their three colleagues are almost a decade younger.
Back with the troupe after doing his military service is Chang Tzu-ling (張子凌), who last appeared with the company in 2007’s Velocity (速度). The other two — Hung Huai-te (黃懷德) and Chang Chien-chih (張堅志) — just finished their undergraduate degrees this year.
“The new guys are a good fit so far but they are still following. But they have so much energy they don’t stop,” Chen said.
Chang has a bit of professional experience under his belt, having danced with LAFA & Artists this year.
“Horse is different from TNUA [Taipei National University of the Arts] because with Wu-kang we’ll play, try everything together. At TNUA the choreographer will tell you to what to do, but here we all try together, we have to think more,” Chang said.
The 24-year-old Hung, who appears to have taken on the role of the prankster, said he basically had two jobs with Horse: The first is to lower the age of the group and the second is to keep the energy levels up.
Yang said there are benefits to getting older, even for a dancer, such as becoming more relaxed on stage.
“This piece has some meaning about transition, about comparing two generations, getting together to become something or become competitive. One interesting thing is that the older ones, we aren’t scared of performing solos, we are just ourselves. They [the younger ones] are more inside themselves when they dance, they are so focused on movements, afraid of doing it wrong.”
Growing Up has proven to be a transition piece for the company in terms of theater space as well. They are moving up and out to NTUA’s Experimental Theater in Guandu, where they are removing some of the seats to extend the stage out into the audience. With an audience on three sides, coming up with a set design was a challenge.
“We were going to have a weird set, but we want to keep it simple,” Chen said, without going into more detail except to say dirt would play a role, though not the truck-full they originally planned to use.
For the music for the 70-minute piece, Horse will be using a soundscape created by French sound artist Yannick Dauby, who worked with the troupe on last year’s Bones.
Growing up is always hard, but one thing you can always be sure of with a Horse performance: there will definitely be a lot of fun along the way.
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