Kaohsiung City Ballet’s (KCB, 高雄城市芭蕾舞團) seventh annual choreographic showcase, Dance Shoe 2010 (2010點子鞋), launches its three-city tour this weekend with two shows at the Experimental Theater in Taipei. Unfortunately for ballet lovers in the capital, if you don’t have your tickets already you will have to travel south next month to see the show.
KCB founder and artistic director Chang Hsiu-ru (張秀如) began the series to give young choreographers a platform for their work and a chance to develop their own dance vocabulary. If the almost single-minded focus on modern dance in Taiwan has left ballet dancers at a disadvantage in terms of study and performance opportunities, then choreographers who want to create ballets have it even worse. Chang’s annual showcase has been a godsend for them.
The five choreographers on this year’s program are a mix of old and new faces, which is great because the Dance Shoe series offers audiences a chance to see how the different choreographers are developing as well as giving them a first look at some fresh talent.
The “old” faces in the lineup are Wang Kuo-chuen (王國權), whose pieces were in 2007’s and last year’s Dance Shoe, Tsai Po-cheng (蔡博丞), whose works have been included for the past five editions and Yeh Ming-hwa (葉名樺), a former KCB dancer who choreographed for the show for the first time last year.
Hsu Cheng-wei (許程崴) will be a familiar face to KCB fans because she worked with the company in Chang’s production of The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭).
Twenty-four-year-old Huang Huai-te (黃懷德) is the new kid on the block as far as Dance Shoe shows go, but dance fans may remember him from Horse Dance Company’s (驫舞劇場) production Growing Up (正在長高), staged in December. Judging from that show, he’s a terrific dancer and he sounded interested in testing his choreographic wings as well when I interviewed him last November with the rest of the Horse members, so it will be interesting to see his solo this weekend, which he created for Yeh.
Pulling double duty as a choreographer and performer — in separate pieces — is always rough and Yeh said in an e-mail that working on her new 20-minute ballet Ponytail and the solo “almost killed” her.
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