The second choreographer featured in the National Theater Concert Hall’s 2011 New Idea Dance series is Lai Tsui-shuang (賴翠霜), whose Drawer (抽屜) will be performed in the Experimental Theater this weekend.
Lai has a high standard to meet after Lin Wen-chung (林文中), whose WCdance (林文中舞團) opened the series with the audience-pleasing Small Nanguan (小南管) last month, as does the final choreographer in the series, Cheng Tsung-lung (鄭宗龍), whose On the Road (在路上) will be performed from July 22 to July 24.
However, Lai has already established a reputation for exceeding expectations.
Photo Courtesy of Chen Chang-chih
After graduating from Chinese Culture University, she studied dance, music and theater at the Folkwang Academy in Essen, Germany, before joining the Folkwang Dance Studio in 1998. Among the awards she has collected since she started choreographing is the 2009 Taishin Arts Award for Capital Ballet’s (台北首督芭蕾舞團) production of Surround (井).
Though still based in Germany, Lai has worked with several local companies over the years, including Dance Forum Taipei (舞蹈空間) and Assembly Dance Theatre (組合語言舞團), so it is terrific to see her strike out on her own, especially since that meant she was able to handpick her dancers for Drawer. She is as well-known for her dynamic, yet very fluid, dance-theater inspired choreography as she is for her use of multimedia technology and props, and for Drawer she has joined forces with Kelvin Tsai (蔡坤霖), who has carved out a name for himself as a digital artist. Lai’s works may be simple, if not sparse, in terms of settings, but her use of imagination — both hers and the audience’s — create fully fleshed worlds.
For her newest work, she has taken the image of a commonplace drawer, a place used to store belongings, and extrapolated it into a space where emotions, memories and secrets can be held, perhaps long after they should have been disposed of.
Photo Courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
Lai says Drawer is the second in what will become the Surround series.
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