Scarecrow Contemporary Dance Company (稻草人現代舞蹈團) has collaborated with sound artist Wang Lien-chang (王連晟) for its new production, Unbreakable City (攣‧城), which opens tonight at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park in Taipei.
The old industrial warehouse location appears to be the perfect setting for the interdisciplinary, multi-media piece, choreographed by the Greater Tainan-based company’s artistic director Luo Wen-jinn (羅文瑾), which features dancers in tiny boxes, interactive installation works and a passage from the 1972 novel, Invisible Cities by Italian journalist and writer Italo Calvino, which served as its inspiration.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else,” Calvino wrote in his book, which imagines a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan (忽必烈), where the medival Italian explorer describes 55 cities to the emperor.
Photo Courtesy of Liu Ren-huar
Unbreakable City is an equally internationally collaborative work, with input from Danish artist/designer Carl Emil Carlsen. The piece portrays two cities, both upside down, which mirror the physical, psychological and spiritual states of both their inhabitants and the cities themselves.
The company’s program notes describe a city as a living creature with spirit and soul that is looking both for her history and her future, her destruction and rebirth. The twin cities are personified by the seven dancers, the installations (Wang specializes in the use of interactive devices with sound performances) and technology. Wang says that he is “committed to the seamless combination of images and sounds created through computer algorithms.”
The idea, so beloved of dance theater proponents, is to achieve a “crossing between reality and fantasy, the blurring the boundaries of the actual situation.”
Photo Courtesy of Liu Ren-huar
What appears in the promotional video is a lot of blurry, jerky shots of individual dancers who look like they are receiving electric shocks.
Scarecrow is known for performing at unusual venues and over the years the troupe has produced a number of site-specific works. It will be interesting to see how it transforms the long barren building in the Songshan Park, especially given that Unbreakable City had to be designed to be performed in the more traditional setting of the Tainan Municipal Cultural Center, where it will be staged next month, as well.
Unbreakable City will be performed tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2:30pm at Songshan Cultural and Creative Park (松山文創園區多功能展演廳), 133 Guangfu S Rd, Taipei City (台北市光復南路133號).
Additional performances are Dec. 12 and Dec. 13 at 7:30pm, Dec. 13 and Dec. 14 at 2:30pm at Tainan Municipal Cultural Center (臺南文化中心演藝廳), 332, Chunghua Rd Sec 3, Greater Tainan (臺南市中華東路3段332號).
Tickets for Taipei performances are NT$600; all others are NT$500, available at the door, at www.artsticket.com.tw and at convenience store ticketing kiosks.
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