French hip-hop choreographer Mourad Merzouki said on Wednesday that he was nervous about how Taipei audiences would react to his newest work, YogeeTi.
He needn’t have worried, at least judging by the audience members at Sunday’s matinee at the National Theater in Taipei. He had them with the opening movement, when the 10 dancers, clad in gray or black long-sleeved unitards, moved in floorwork that was as pointed and sharp as knitting needles. The performers lined up horizontally with their legs moving in unison over and under, or scuttled back and forth like shuttles in a weaving machine.
That was the whole idea, of course, since YogeeTi was a collaboration with Taiwanese fashion designer Johan Ku (古又文) who has made his name with spectacularly clunky, yet often delicate, knits.
Photo Courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
YogeeTi moved seamlessly back and forth between duets and group work, a male/female pairing or male/male, sometimes playful, sometimes challenging. The pops, hops and articulation of hip-hop were fused with modern dance, neither overpowering the other. Merzouki has taken the energy from the streets and polished it until it gleams appropriately for the stage.
The dancers not only wore knits, they interacted and created them, from braiding plaits in string curtains to sliding around on the floor on knit cushions.
Kudos must go to Benjamin Lebreton for a set design utilizing Ku’s giant knotted creations and curtains of string and to Yoann Tivoli for a great lighting design.
It is a testament to National Taipei University of the Arts that the five Taiwanese dancers in the piece — Chen Hong-ling (陳宏菱), Hsieh Yi-chun (謝宜君), Wu Chien-wei (吳建緯), Kan Han-hsin (甘翰馨) and Kao Hsin-yu (高辛毓) — all graduates of its dance school, fitted so seamlessly in with the five French hip-hop artists. It was especially nice to see Wu again; he’s a lovely dancer who obviously had put on some muscle to keep up with his French counterparts.
YogeeTi will be performed in Greater Kaohiung’s Cultural Center’s Chihteh Hall on Saturday at 7:30pm.
A quieter, but no less frenetic program, also part of the Taiwan International Festival of the Arts, was put on by Laurie Anderson at Taipei’s National Concert Hall on Saturday night. Anderson may have mellowed a bit over the years, but she remains a fascinating and challenging performer.
The flood of words, images and sounds that washed over the Concert Hall in her Delusion sometimes came so fast that it was hard for the mind to process everything, even for a native English speaker. Luckily, there were Chinese subtitles for her text.
While playing the violin and a synthesizer, Anderson told tales and asked questions — about the death of her mother, the last thing you say before you turn into dirt, who owns the moon, plus a disturbing dream about her rat terrier Lolabelle. Sometimes she used her own voice, sometimes she lowered it electronically to a male alter ego, and other times she just let the music speak.
The programers for the annual Taiwan International Festival of the Arts deserve a big round of applause too for bringing such terrific shows to Taiwan.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
A fossil jawbone found by a British girl and her father on a beach in Somerset, England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating to 202 million years ago that appears to have been among the largest animals ever on Earth. Researchers said on Wednesday the bone, called a surangular, was from a type of ocean-going reptile called an ichthyosaur. Based on its dimensions compared to the same bone in closely related ichthyosaurs, the researchers estimated that the Triassic Period creature, which they named Ichthyotitan severnensis, was between 22-26 meters long. That would make it perhaps the largest-known marine reptile and would