The winners in the dance world this year were the audiences, who got to see an amazing variety of talented performers both local and foreign. However, dance lovers — and producers — were losers as well, because there was often too much of a good thing, with three or more shows competing against each other in a weekend. An explosion of festivals only added to the din toward the end of the year.
Among the standouts were some familiar faces in new — for Taipei — roles, a cross-cultural collaboration and a few big names from abroad.
The absolute best of the year came early on, when Lin Mei-hong (林美虹) brought 15 of her dancers from Tanztheater des Staatstheaters Darmstadt, where she has been artistic director since 2004, to perform Schwanengesang (Swan Song) at the National Theater in March as part of the 2010 Taiwan International Festival.
The Yilan-born Lin has maintained her ties with Taiwan’s dance world as director of the Lanyang Dance Troupe (蘭陽芭蕾舞團), which she danced with as a girl. However, her productions for that company would never prepare you for what she has accomplished in Germany. Schwanengesang is a tour de force by an artist at the height of her creative powers. She turned a tale of love, obsession and death into a thrilling piece of dance theater that more than redeemed that genre from the overblown caricature it too often becomes.
In May, Novel Hall Dance hosted British dancer Akram Khan for the fourth time, but it was the first time he has performed the kind of classic Kathak pieces that gained him fame. His Gnosis was a tantalizing, mesmerizing glimpse into a very different world.
In June, Taipei Dance Forum (舞蹈空間) moved into the National Theater for a wild, wickedly funny collaboration with the all-male Japanese troupe the Condors, who more than lived up to their prankster billing. Moon River (月球水) gave each group a chance to show their respective strengths and still try something new, with the video clips alone worth the price of admission.
Wang Tzer-shing (王澤馨) pulled off another stunning International Ballet Star Gala in August, keeping hope alive for Taipei’s beleaguered balletomes. Silvia Azzoni shone in John Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid with partner Alexandre Riabko, while Sarah Lamb and Rupert Pennefather showed a very modern angularity in Christopher Wheeldon’s Tryst before leaving the audience breathless with Frederick Ashton’s poetic Thais Pas de Deux.
The first weekend of the National Theater Concert Hall’s Dance in Autumn series proved to be the capstone for the year, with two programs — Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company on the big stage with Deca Dance 2010 and Ho Hsiao-mei’s (何曉玫) new troupe, Meimage Dance (玫舞擊), in the Experimental Theater.
Batsheva was a tour de force of glorious feet-pounding energy interspersed with bouts of quiet intensity that left you hungering for more of artistic director Ohad Naharin’s work. It was also great fun to see recent Taipei National University of the Arts (國立臺北藝術大學) graduate Lee Chen-wei (李貞葳) more than holding her own with the rest of the company.
One of Lee’s former professors, Ho also left her audiences hungering for more with her Woo! Barbie (Woo!芭比), a visually arresting and emotionally disturbing look at the role of women in contemporary Taiwanese society.
While it will probably be years before Taipei will get to see the Tanztheater des Staatstheaters Darmstadt or Batsheva again, local choreographers and producers such as Ho, Wang and Dance Forum’s Ping Heng (平珩) have consistently provided quality shows against enormous odds, and will hopefully continue to do so in the years to come.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS