Cui Jian (崔健) rocked Taipei on Friday night with a blistering two-hour concert in his second appearance in Taiwan since headlining the Ho-Hai-Yan Rock Festival in 2007. Donning his signature tattered white cap with a red star emblazoned on front, China’s “godfather of rock” provided a fitting inauguration for the city’s newest concert venue, Legacy Taipei (傳音樂展演空間), which holds around 1,000 persons and was nearly at full capacity.
It’s easy to see why Cui often draws comparisons to Western rock icons like Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Kurt Cobain. His music is clearly inspired by an indignant spirit, sense of urgency and subversive energy. But he and his six-piece band have also crafted a unique sound with an impressive rock vocabulary that covers everything from hip-hop and electronic pop to reggae and ska.
Cui put on a solid concert that was engaging from start to finish. The band began with Balls Under the Red Flag (紅旗下的蛋), the title track from Cui’s 1994 album, which had an alluring, funky junkyard groove. A ska-infused song followed, setting the tone for the evening with anthemic choruses and driving grooves.
Audience members started singing along early in the evening as the band played Nothing to My Name (一無所有), one of Cui’s concert staples and a breakthrough hit that became an anthem during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
During a press conference earlier in the day, Cui mentioned the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy when pressed to name other bands he admired. Those influences were heard in the evening’s set. The band played newer songs like Get Over That Day (超越那一天) and Blue Bone (藍色骨頭), which featured some smooth rapping by one of the band’s two drummers, Bei Bei (貝貝).
For the final song, a funky jazz number, Cui invited his “Taiwanese sisters” to come on stage and dance. It went over well with the crowd, but looked slightly awkward when Cui’s stage crew shooed the 14 or so women off the stage just before the song ended, as if to say the party was over.
The band was thoroughly professional and displayed first-class musicianship. The distinctive sound of Cui’s recordings translates well live, thanks to veteran members Liu Yuan (劉元), who played the baritone saxophone and Chinese flutes, and guitarist Eddie Luc Lalasoa, a Madagascar native that has played with Cui since the beginning of his career.
Throughout the night, Cui kept his stage banter to a minimum, sometimes briefly introducing songs in his thick Beijing accent and gruff, raspy voice.
The concert went without a break and the band returned for two encores. Audience members sang along and swayed to the final song, the sweet rock ballad Girl in the Greenhouse (花房姑娘). Between encores, Cui told the audience, “I will definitely
be back.”
The boys of the Horse Dance Company (驫舞劇場) have grown up. The six men delivered a finely nuanced and polished performance of Growing Up (正在長高) at Taipei National University of the Arts’ Experimental Theater in Guandu on Saturday afternoon.
Taking over a space twice as large as they usually use, they more than amply filled the room, both in stage utilization and with the audience. Removing a couple of rows of seats, they created a long stage that extended from the back of the theater right up to the railings of the second tiers. The walls were left exposed so you could see all the rigging and the large metal door that leads to the set-building room behind the theater. The floor was covered with white mylar flooring and the only “set” was an archipelago of small crescent-shaped islands of dirt.
Although the space was expansive, Horse retained a sense of intimacy by keeping most of the dancing front and center, with the choreography consisting largely of duets and solos. While there were bursts of exuberance, the emphasis was on small, tightly focused movements, such as Hung Huai-te’s (黃懷德) solo that expanded into a “shaking duet” with Su Wei-chia (蘇威嘉). The soundscape by Yannick Dauby meshed perfectly, providing a backdrop that ranged from some industrial sounds to lapping waves, rain and percussive elements.
Hung and fellow newcomer Chang Chien-chih (張堅志) more than held their own with the company’s founders Chen Wu-kang (陳武康), Su and Yang Yu-ming (楊育鳴), as well as Chang Tzu-ling (張子凌). Chen, Su and Yang may have complained about the younger men making them feel their age during rehearsals, but they didn’t look ready to give up the stage anytime soon, thankfully.
The chilly weather on Friday night up on Laoquanshan (老泉山) in Muzha (木柵) may have had audience members huddling into their jackets, scarves and blankets, but it didn’t seem to deter the members of U-Theatre (優劇場) and their youth troupe, who were clad in their usual linen/cotton mix of wide-legged pants and sleeveless V-neck tops. You have to be a dedicated fan to make the trek up the mountain to see the show, and audience members were well rewarded for braving the cold with a charming show.
Company leaders Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀) and Huang Chih-chun (黃誌群) turned a hillside into their stage, utilizing the paths up and around the trees and a new small platform and open-sided hut, while the audience sat in the clearing below. It was a fitting environment since the story running through The Message (喂!向前走) was set in a forest.
The focus on the show was on U-Theatre’s youth troupe, who drummed, sang, acted, danced and performed martial arts. There are more than 50 junior high and high school youngsters in the training program the company began a few years ago, although only those that have been in the program for at least two years — about two dozen — were used in the show. Their polished performances, however, belied their ages and it wasn’t until a couple of them came down for a post-show discussion that you realized just how young they were.
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