You have to believe in karma when a Taoist religious procession on Saturday afternoon holds up traffic as you are trying to get to a dance performance about the Eight Immortals.
Century Contemporary Dance Company’s (世紀當代舞團) Back to the Eight Immortals (鮮人跳), on show at the Experimental Theater over the weekend, was a collaborative effort between eight dancers and eight artists to put the legendary Chinese figures into a modern context. The dancers worked with their artist or artists on the concept, costume and staging for their characters and then choreographed their own solos.
Artistic director and founder Yao Shu-fen (姚淑芬) wanted to push her dancers to develop their choreographic talents as a way of helping them extend their artistic working life. After the show, she said the dancers had complained that despite all the research and reading their were doing, they were having trouble figuring out how to identify with their immortal and how to update the figure — until she told them to think of anime and manga characters and their magic tools.
Photo Courtesy of Liu Chen-hsiang
That explains some of the costuming. However, even with the program, it was often hard to figure out which immortal was being portrayed and it seemed that the difficulty in identifying with the character led to more dialogue and less dance in some segments.
Dancer Kuo Chiu-miao (郭秋妙) and Huang Han-cheng’s (黃瀚正) take on the androgynous Lan Tsai-ho (藍采和) was a stunning costume made-up of a clear plastic sleeveless jacket and about 30 clear balloons that completely enveloped her torso. Kuo’s solo was riveting, especially once the balloons were released to float on a string above her head, as she made it look like the balloons were actually lifting her off the floor.
Dancer Li Hui-wen (李蕙雯) and Chan Chia-hua’s (詹嘉華) creation for Tsao Kuo-chiu (“uncle Tsao,” 曹國舅), whose jade tablet can purify the environment, was a beautiful tableau that saw Li emerge from a projection of flowing water that later became spreading ink drops and floods of Chinese characters as she danced before it.
Hsu Chien-yu (許倩瑜), as Ho Hsien-ku (何仙姑) — the only woman among the eight immortals — was dressed as an anime-type maid in short skirt and frilly apron. Whoever came up with the idea — Hsu or her collaborators Chang Ya-wen (張雅雯) and Huang Da-wang (黃大旺) — to “modernize” the goddess as a woman trapped in a love-hate relationship with food, was brilliant. Hsu spends much of her solo reaching for photographs of fast food hanging from the rafters or, in one part, the package of crisps that dangles from a headpiece wire before her eyes.
Creative costuming also helped some dancers find inspiration at Taipei National University of the Arts’ Summer Dance Concert. The show was designed to be performed outdoors at the school’s Huang Shan Theater, but Saturday night’s show was forced into the Dance Theater because of rain. However, the students’ energy and enthusiasm made up for the day’s dampness.
The all-white costumes for Trisha Brown’s Sololos weren’t much to look at, being a cross between long underwear and athletic gear, but their simplicity echoed the deceptive starkness of Brown’s choreography, a fun examination of shapes, movements and patterns that started with the students moving among the audience before the piece officially began.
Ku Ming-shen’s (古名伸) May (五月天) was the one piece during which I really felt the absence of the outdoors. This cheery, lyrical work is a celebration of being outside in the spring, something costume designer Wang Chi-chen (王啟貞) picked up on with the light, gauzy fabric and floating lines of greens and browns.
Hugo Fanari designed the costumes for his Just Do It and the bold eye make-up and corsets/briefs/stockings for the women and flamboyant briefs for the men helped them convey the raw sensuality they might otherwise have been too shy to portray in this heavy metal meets Rocky Horror Picture Show creation.
Ku and crew must have been happy that Sunday’s sunny skies allowed a return to the outdoors. The dance school will give one more performance tonight, at 7:45pm.
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