On Thursday, Pilgrimage (朝聖之行) filled the small space of the Nadou Theater (納豆劇場), home to the Taiyuan Puppet Theatre Company (台原偶戲團). Five performances of the group’s latest original work played to full houses over the weekend, and deservedly so, for despite some minor technical issues the production stormed the parapets of convention with the company’s usual boisterous zeal.
Pilgrimage is a multidisciplinary production that not only combines theatrical techniques — puppets, dancers and soundscape design are all integral parts of the show — but also draws inspiration from the music, poetry and legends of many lands.
Taiwan puppets are still recognizably at the center of the production, but in Pilgrimage they have left the traditional proscenium to take up residence on the water of a huge paddling pool. Great use is made of this device, and though the front rows in the small theater were in danger of getting splashed during some of the more intense action sequences, at no point did the pool seem merely a gimmick. The story, which is built around two great seafaring adventurers — the Ming Dynasty general Koxinga (國姓爺, also known as Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功)), who built a short-lived fiefdom based on Taiwan in the 17th century, and the Portuguese soldier-poet Luis Vaz de Camoes — makes perfect sense in this aquatic context.
Through the music, readings of Camoes’ poetry, and the use of lighting, the entire environment of the theater was integrated into a remarkably organic whole. This is the sort of intimate experience that small theater should be about.
The effectiveness of the setting was slightly undermined by the acoustics, which the enclosed space rendered rough and reverberant. This was especially unfortunate in some of the spoken passages, where a crisp delivery would have distinguished the voice more clearly from the rumbling undertones of the ocean and the musical accompaniment, and given the soundscape greater variety of timbre. The live musical accompaniment by Huang Sze-nung (黃思農), the founder of the experimental theater group Against Again Troupe (再拒劇團), was a seamless mixture of Latin-inspired and Taiwanese folk tunes, and was crucial in linking the two stories told in Pilgrimage. It too would have been improved by a better control of sound levels.
On the water-covered stage, the action was well-paced and there was never a dull moment in the 75-minute running time. The high points ranged from the classic beauty and skill of Tsai Pei-jen’s (蔡佩仁) Butoh-inspired performance as Koxinga’s mother, to delightful puppet theater trickery, as when the handheld puppet of Saci — a leprechaun-type character from Brazilian folklore — is made to urinate on stage.
The mixture of soulfulness (Pilgrimage is after all a meditation on life, love and death) and humor is well judged, with ponderousness neatly sidestepped, and the quicksilver shifts in tone keep the audience engaged from beginning to end. While the complex technical requirements of the clearly stretched the resources of such a small theater, there was a sense of exuberance that happily pushed against the boundaries of the possible, and it was this sense of creative energy that gave the production its special appeal.
Melbourne’s Chunky Move also crossed genres at the National Theater on Saturday. What stood out the most was the humanity at the heart of a technology-driven and -laden Mortal Engine. Among all the fantastic images created in the hour-long show, the ones that lingered were the oft-repeated motif of intertwining hands or fingers of two dancers, including the final scene when the hands were softly lit by an overhead spot while the rest of the stage went dark.
While Taipei audiences have seen several innovative video-laser-intensive dance performances in recent years, including those by Lloyd Newson of London’s DV8, Austrian Klaus Obermaier and Taiwan’s own prodigy Huang Yi (黃翊), Gideon Obarzenek’s choreography more than held its own against the pyrotechnics created by Frieder Weiss’ computer system, the laser and video work of Robin Fox and Ben Frost’s bass-heavy, pulsating soundscape.
The set at first appeared to be little more than a large, square white ramp so steeply angled that the dancers had to crawl and roll onto it, often with leg movements so sharply articulated that they resembled mutant spiders more than humans, especially when covered in video imagery that looked like black soot. The ramp, which served both as a dance floor and a screen for the video and light projections, was actually three separate panels that could ingeniously be lowered or raised to form a tilting base or a vertical wall.
The first half of Mortal Engine is largely a study in black and white, as dancers move in puddles of light or darkness. Often it is hard to tell where the dancer or dancers left off and the shadows began. In one scene a woman is bathed in light, a man in darkness, and as they attract and repel one other, more of the black appears to rub off on the woman until they are both enshrouded in a black film. In the end the dancers roll off opposite sides of the ramp, leaving their shadows behind. The shadows are then pulled toward each other until they become an ever-expanding black circle that swallows the stage.
In other scene, a woman stands against a vertical wall, bathed in electrical energy, her body quivering and jolting like a Saturday-morning cartoon character being electrocuted, held in place by a man standing in darkness next to the wall, gripping her hand.
Another vertical scene has a man and a woman leaning against the wall, almost like they were Velcroed to it, which was apropos, since each time they moved — be it an arm, a leg or the whole body — the movement was echoed both by a dark shadow and the suction-like sound of two strips of Velcro peeling apart. It was like watching a video of a couple tossing and turning on a bed as they sleep, although with sound effects.
Laser-light displays entertained the audience between scenes and also served to hide the dancers as they positioned themselves. The only scene that was a bit over the top was when a green strobe pierced the theater from the back of the stage, while fog machines positioned in the first balcony boxes shot out clouds of smoke to create a cavernous vortex similar to the swirling black and green hole that swallowed the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s (雲門舞集) dancers at the end of Wind Shadows (風影) in 2006. One arm outstretched, a dancer appeared to be moving the walls of light and smoke with his or her hands, but the repeated bursts of smoke got to be a bit much.
The six dancers — Kristy Ayers, Sara Black, Rennie McDougall, James Shannon, Adam Synott and Jorijn Vriesendorp — were terrific. It was easy to see why Chunky Move has become such a popular Australian export. Hopefully this first visit by the company won’t be its last.
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