Taiwanese choreographer Allen Yu (余能盛) has developed a reputation as something of a marathon man, not for his running prowess, but for his year-round work schedule.
For more than a decade, he has spent his vacations from the Graz Opera House in Austria, where he is deputy ballet director and choreographer, back in Taiwan to cast and mount new productions for his Chamber Ballet Taipei (台北室內芭蕾舞團). It is an exhausting lifestyle, but Yu seems to thrive on it.
He says that he finished his last piece in Austria on June 28, flew back to Taiwan the next day and began work on June 30.
Photo Courtesy of Chamber Ballet Taipei
“The [August] 17 is the last performance in Taipei. After the matinee I go straight to airport to fly back to Austria. I have already spent all my holiday time,” Yu said in a telephone interview from Greater Tainan on Wednesday night.
After last year’s massive Swan Lake and Giselle in 2011, Yu has pared things down this year, opting to go the neoclassical route by restaging Le Sacre du Printemps, which he first created for the company in 2009, and pairing it with a new dance, The First Day (第一天), which is set to Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, the New World Symphony.
“I don’t always want to always do the same thing,” Yu said.
Traveling back and forth between Taiwan and Austria over the years has given Yu something of an outsider’s view of Taiwan, leaving him wondering about what many people here take for granted, such as the proliferation of bars on apartment balconies and windows and the lack of windows.
“Just the front and back of apartments have windows. In Europe, people would not live like that,” he said, adding a while later: “There are ‘jail’ houses everywhere. I cannot understand why [because] Taiwan is very safe.”
So for this year’s production, he decided to focus on some of the things that he sees in Taiwan that he thinks are a bit strange.
The First Day shows humans at the start of life, with the main character having to struggle out of a forest made of black plastic, he said. It ends with the dancers walking into a bright light, walking into the future, he said.
“It is so sunshiny, so romantic,” he said.
Le Sacre du Printemps is much darker. Instead of a primitive society and ritual sacrifice, Yu’s version sees modern-day Taiwanese as the sacrificial victims.
“In this society most people are already the sacrifice, but they don’t know it,” he said. “People are good, but so stressed.”
While Yu admitted that it would be more logical to start with Sacre and save The First Day for the second half, he said he and conductor Jeppe Moulijn decided it would be better to leave Sacre for last, to leave some questions for audience to think about when they go home.
Moulijin was also concerned that the dancers have to work so hard in Sacre that they would not have any energy left over if it was performed first, Yu said.
Yu is using 26 dancers in this year’s production, including Romanian dancers Cristina Dijmaru, Valentin Stoica and Bordan Canila, who danced the lead roles in Swan Lake, whom he wanted to work with again.
“They worked so well with me and our dancers last year,” he said.
The company will be performing with the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra (長榮交響樂團) for its shows in Greater Taichung and Taipei, conducted by Moulijn.Tickets are going fast for the three Taipei shows, which begin on Aug. 15. The first night’s show is already sold out.
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