It is amazing what you can do with just 10 dancers and a blank white stage set, as demonstrated by Dance Forum Taipei (舞蹈空間舞蹈團) over the weekend.
Choreographer Yang Ming-lung’s (楊銘隆) Eastern Tale (風云) riffs on the fate of Yu Ji (虞姬), the favorite concubine of Xiang Yu (項羽), king of Western Chu. A legendary four-line poem by Yu telling of her love and devotion to her besieged king has inspired generations of artists, even if it apparently wasn’t written until long after her suicide. Yang gives three options for Yu’s fate: suicide, death in battle and survival with her beloved.
Yang’s work is usually abstract, and despite the inspiration of the millennia-old story, the narrative threads of Eastern Tale are left to the program notes. In Yang’s presentation, Xiang and Yu’s relationship is so minimalist it is almost chaste; even in the duets their bodies barely touch.
Photo courtesy of Hsu Pin and Hantz Yen
The drama and the passion are left to three wonderful musicians from the Taipei Chinese Orchestra (台北市立國樂團) to provide: Huang Yung-ming (黃永明) on the guqin (古琴), Cheng Wen-hsin (鄭聞欣) on the pipa (琵琶) and Chang Shu-jan (張舒然) on the erhu (二胡). They sat behind the white scrim at the back of the stage, softly spotlighted during their segments, which ranged from traditional and more modern arrangements to the very electronic — composed by Tseng Yu-chung (曾毓忠), a professor at National Chiao Tung University’s Institute of Music — for the battle scenes.
With four men and six women, the battles were always going to be more intimated than full-scale — using martial arts acrobatics and huge flags. In a similar way, Yu’s suicide is foreshadowed by two women wearing the Chinese classical dance water sleeves on their arms and legs, the ends of the sleeves tinged red, before a male dancer wielding a huge red flag envelopes Yu as the lights come down.
Dance Forum Taipei rarely uses props, so it was interesting to see them used along the lines of Chinese opera: long strips of red or white cloth that served as walls or roads, especially in the final scenes as the dancers slid on and off stage on the strips, or interwove them into a raised star-shape, with the dancer portraying Yu balancing on top. Yang left it to the audience to use their imaginations to fill in the blanks.
He also incorporated several other elements from Chinese classical opera and dance — the flexed feet and hands in walking, the tilt of the head, and the posturing of military men — but always with a modern dance edge. I especially like the way the women walked in groups and pairs: rising slightly on one foot while the opposite knee is lifted with a flexed foot, then a hip-shimmy as the lifted foot is lowered. Yang demanded a lot of his dancers and they delivered.
It’s too bad that more people didn’t have the chance to see Eastern Tale. There were several empty spots on the ground floor of Taipei’s Chungshan Hall on Saturday night, which was not just a shame, it was almost criminal.
The show, part of the Taipei Arts Festival, was sold out more than two weeks early, except for the NT$400 seats usually reserved for students at the back of the balcony. One had to wonder where the ticket holders for the pricier seats were. It seems likely that many of those seats had been given to people who never planned to attend, which meant that others who wanted to see the show could not.
The company leaves for Amsterdam today, where they will perform Eastern Tale on Friday and Saturday for the opening of the Tropentheater’s Taipei Today festival.
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