Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) dance professor and choreographer Ho Hsiao-mei (何曉玫) believes in giving young Taiwanese choreographers and dancers a chance to show their talent, and so for a second year her Meimage Dance (玫舞擊) company is hosting a new choreographer project.
Entitled 2012 Collecting Button: New Choreographer (2012 鈕扣 New Choreographer計劃), the show at the 6F Performance Hall of Eslite bookstore’s Xinyi Store presents the work of four dancer-choreographers: Lin Li-chuan (林立川) , Chen Yun-ru (陳韻如), Luo Wei-chun (羅瑋君) and Chang Yi-chun (張逸軍).
The Taipei Times caught up with Ho, who was extra busy this week between classes, administrative duties and producing the show, to ask about the four and their works.
Photos courtesy of Meimage Dance
Three of the four are graduates of TNUA’s dance program — though Ho says she’s not biased in favor of the school’s grads — while the fourth, Lin, graduated from the dance program at Purchase College, State University of New York. All four have spent time traveling, studying and working outside of Taiwan.
“Four dancers, all born in Taiwan, but right now you can tell they think in a different way through their body language; they are Taiwanese, but the way they chose to move is different. I thought it was important to share this with audiences in Taiwan,” Ho said.
Chen, who impressed audiences in last year’s choreographer’s show with Playback, has been choreographing in Dessau, Germany, where she dances with the Anhaltisches Theater Dessau (she was also the star of Meimage’s debut piece Woo! Barbie). Her piece in this year’s show is a duet titled “Breathing” (呼吸).
“Yun-ru said that you never notice your breathing. She was interested in [whether or not] you can start from that point and have a movement,” Ho said. “She talked about how when her grandfather was very sick in the hospital and couldn’t breathe well, she wanted to breathe for him.”
The piece has come out great, Ho said.
Lin, who trained as a classical ballet dancer and worked as a dancer in the US after graduating from Purchase, has titled his duet under frame.
“He’s kind of trying to break through with his own body,” Ho said. “Trying to find a new language of his own … But there is a lot of ballet technique in the piece,” she said.
Luo, who has worked with the Henri Oguike Dance Company, a contemporary troupe in the UK, calls her solo “Forward” (前行). Ho says it is a self-portrait about breaking free from restrictions, from rules.
“[Luo] feels like she was always a good girl until after she graduated from TNUA, when she was trying to get a job in another country, to put herself into a different world. Suddenly everyone was asking her ‘What do you think about this, about that’ and she realized she never thought about things, she just followed the rules,” Ho said. “In the piece, she’s tied from the wrists with elastic ropes, kind of looks like a puppy, but she has to break out.”
Chang, who has worked as soloist with the Cirque du Soleil, has titled his piece “The Round Sky” (天圓地方).
Ho has known Chang for many years, ever since he was a student at the high school affiliated with TNUA and says she was always attracted by his performance quality, which was very flashy.
“It’s so hard to change him, even when he wants to learn, he still goes his own way,” she said. “He wanted to make his own piece, a solo, with media, big props, to fly in the air.”
“Then one day he said that he realized after he talked with me that he just wanted all those things to hide behind. I told him he didn’t need all those things, so I told him he could have only one thing. It’s a journey for him to discover himself, how to be simpler, more centered,” Ho said.
“His piece doesn’t have a story,” she said. “He started as a night market kid, now he’s traveled the world, now he can be his own self.”
Four choreographers — two men, two women, two duets, two solos — linked together by a common thread of travel and self-discovery. They all started from Taiwan, went off in different directions, and have come home with lots of stories to tell.
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
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located