Chen Wu-kang (陳武康) and Su Wei-chia (蘇威嘉), two of the cofounders of the all-male dance collective Horse (驫舞劇場), have known each other for 15 years. They probably thought they knew each as well as could be — until they teamed up with Hong Kong director Edward Lam (林奕華) to stage Horse’s spring production, Relationship Between Two Men (兩男關係), at the Experimental Theater in Taipei.
The hour-long show, a mix of theatre and a dance duet, explores emotions, friendship, sexuality and power.
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Chen compared the creative process of working with Lam to going into psychotherapy.
Photo courtesy of Horse
“We’ve known him a long time and have been looking for a way to work together ... The first thing he asked us was ‘Can you two kiss each other?’ — but in the end we don’t kiss,” Chen said. “Wei-chia and I know each other so well — 15 years — we’re on the same wavelength, but he [Lam] kept asking so many questions. It felt like a couple going to a psychiatrist — sometimes we went together, sometimes separately, which created some suspicion.”
They worked on the show for about five months, both in Hong Kong and Taipei, he said, adding: “I was so ready to dance after all the talking.”
Lam thought the show should be just about the two friends, Chen said, though he worries that “some people may think it’s a bit masturbatory or narcissist.”
“I’ve never tried this before — being me [on stage] — it’s so real, so just the two of us. Sometimes I’m me, sometimes I’m him; I have to keep saying my name, like ‘Wu-kang’s family’ or ‘Wu-kang this,’” Chen said. “In the beginning I was worried where all this talk would lead to — but in the end it leads to dance.”
Asked if such a deeply personal creative process had had an impact on him and Su, Chen said it had.
“I’ve learned a lot about him [Su]. It feels like the journey I took around Taiwan — Taiwan is much more complex than you think,” he said. “I’ve started taking more time to wait, wait until the silence has passed by. Before if there was a silence I would just say ‘fuck’ or start to smoke a cigarette. Now I wait.”
In addition to the shows in Taipei this weekend and next, there will be three shows in Kaohsiung next month.
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