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.
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
The centuries-old fiery Chinese spirit baijiu (白酒), long associated with business dinners, is being reshaped to appeal to younger generations as its makers adapt to changing times. Mostly distilled from sorghum, the clear but pungent liquor contains as much as 60 percent alcohol. It’s the usual choice for toasts of gan bei (乾杯), the Chinese expression for bottoms up, and raucous drinking games. “If you like to drink spirits and you’ve never had baijiu, it’s kind of like eating noodles but you’ve never had spaghetti,” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian writer and wine expert who founded World Baijiu Day a decade