Scheduling problems have kept the Kaohsiung City Ballet (KCB, 高雄城市芭蕾舞團) from making its almost annual pilgrimage north to Taipei with its Dance Shoe (點子鞋) production, which is a loss for Taipei ballet fans, given the caliber of last year’s show.
Company founder Chang Hsiu-ru (張秀如) could not get her troupe into the Experimental Theater before the venue closed for its annual Lunar New Year renovation and clean-up period, and so had to settle for two-city tour.
KCB premiered this year’s Dance Shoe in Greater Tainan two weekends ago and this weekend it returns to its “home theater,” Chihteh Hall at the Kaohsiung Cultural Center, for two shows.
Photo Courtesy of Liu Ren-haur
This 12th version of Dance Shoe features works by four Taiwanese choreographers and one foreign freelancer, all of whom will be familiar names for the company’s fans.
The local choreographers, in keeping with Chang’s desire to showcase southern talent, are either all from southern Taiwan or now work there.
Tsai Po-chen (蔡博丞), who has had pieces in several earlier shows, created the stellar Little Star (小小星辰) last year, while Wang Wei-ming (王維銘), a former Cloud Gate dancer who now teaches at Shu-Te University in Greater Kaohsiung, had a piece in last year and in 2013. Lai Hung-chung (賴翃中) and Dai Ting-ru (戴鼎如), a dancer with the company who is now working on a graduate degree in Taipei, have also contributed in the past.
Photo Courtesy of Liu Ren-haur
Chang hired Romanian dancer-choreographer-videographer Constantin Georgescu to restage the full-length ballet Coppelia (柯碧莉亞) for the company to perform in the Kaohsiung Spring Festival last year and her dancers responded well to the challenge. For this year’s Dance Shoe he has created a work titled Ladies and Fans.
The chance to work with such a variety of choreographers provides valuable experience for Chang’s dancers as well as providing dance audiences a chance to see a combination of modern and classical technique in one setting.
While some dance fans, this reviewer included, are heading south this weekend to see the shows, Chang and the KCB will hopefully be able to return to Taipei with next year’s Dance Shoe.
Photo Courtesy of Liu Ren-haur
Photo Courtesy of Liu Ren-haur
Last week gave us the droll little comedy of People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) consul general in Osaka posting a threat on X in response to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi saying to the Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan may be an “existential threat” to Japan. That would allow Japanese Self Defence Forces to respond militarily. The PRC representative then said that if a “filthy neck sticks itself in uninvited, we will cut it off without a moment’s hesitation. Are you prepared for that?” This was widely, and probably deliberately, construed as a threat to behead Takaichi, though it
Seven hundred job applications. One interview. Marco Mascaro arrived in Taiwan last year with a PhD in engineering physics and years of experience at a European research center. He thought his Gold Card would guarantee him a foothold in Taiwan’s job market. “It’s marketed as if Taiwan really needs you,” the 33-year-old Italian says. “The reality is that companies here don’t really need us.” The Employment Gold Card was designed to fix Taiwan’s labor shortage by offering foreign professionals a combined resident visa and open work permit valid for three years. But for many, like Mascaro, the welcome mat ends at the door. A
Nov. 17 to Nov. 23 When Kanori Ino surveyed Taipei’s Indigenous settlements in 1896, he found a culture that was fading. Although there was still a “clear line of distinction” between the Ketagalan people and the neighboring Han settlers that had been arriving over the previous 200 years, the former had largely adopted the customs and language of the latter. “Fortunately, some elders still remember their past customs and language. But if we do not hurry and record them now, future researchers will have nothing left but to weep amid the ruins of Indigenous settlements,” he wrote in the Journal of
If China attacks, will Taiwanese be willing to fight? Analysts of certain types obsess over questions like this, especially military analysts and those with an ax to grind as to whether Taiwan is worth defending, or should be cut loose to appease Beijing. Fellow columnist Michael Turton in “Notes from Central Taiwan: Willing to fight for the homeland” (Nov. 6, page 12) provides a superb analysis of this topic, how it is used and manipulated to political ends and what the underlying data shows. The problem is that most analysis is centered around polling data, which as Turton observes, “many of these
RSS