The Tainan-based Scarecrow Contemporary Dance Company (稻草人現代舞團) is proof that you don’t have to be based in Taipei to carve out a career in the performing arts.
Founded in 1989, the company is still going strong under the direction of choreographer Luo Wen-jinn (羅文瑾), who became artistic director in 1998, and is getting ready to take the troupe’s most recent production to the Festival d’Avignon Off next month.
The company performed The Keyman (鑰匙人) at the Experimental Theater in Taipei in October before taking the production on a tour of Taiwan. Now the troupe is back in Taipei to perform the piece at Huashan 1914 Creative Park (華山1914) as part of Huashan’s “100 performances in reproduction” (100年再現演出) and a final run-through before heading off to France.
Photo Courtesy of Chen Chang-chih
Since 2007, Luo and company have used literature and poetry as a jumping off point for their dance-theater productions — although Keyman‘s inspiration is a bit darker than most.
Luo took as her themes a sentence from Franz Kafka’s August 1913 diary in which he described feeling like a stranger even among his closest and most beloved family members, and German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s concept that
human beings never have a truly secure moment.
From those rather bleak perceptions she crafted a story about an ordinary family whose members conceal their thoughts and fears about their lives, their careers and their loves from each other, and even themselves. Through her choreography, the dancers portray their characters’ inner conflicts and suffering and show how family can influence mental and physical health.
The family in The Keyman consists of a rather indifferent father, an overprotective mother, a pair of twins who both adore and despise one another and a younger sibling who has yet to gain a sense of identity. There is also a masked, trench-coated stranger, whose intrusion into the family’s life brings out all the insecurities and problems that have been bubbling away beneath the surface.
The production asks audiences to make their own determination about who and what is “key” to the family.
Luo said she has changed the production a bit from last year’s Experimental Theater show, mostly due to the change in location and a need “to adapt to the environment of the theater we are performing in this time.”
One thing that has not changed is the dining room table, which is — as so often is the case — both the central structure uniting the family and the locus around which its dramas take place.
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