There has been a lot of good dance in Taipei this month. However, it did not always make for satisfying productions.
This year’s Taiwan International Festival of Arts brought two major European troupes, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch and Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas to the National Theater, while locally created SAO PLUS at the Eslite Performance Hall grew out of a program that was part of last year’s festival.
Overall, it was the late German choreogapher Pina Bausch’s Palermo Palermo that proved the most satisfying show, although it is a production that exemplified everything that many non-European dance lovers dislike about Bausch — it was more dance theater than dance.
Photo courtesy of At Ease Studio
Palermo Palermo was the culmination of one of the troupe’s foreign residencies, in this case several months in Sicily. However, unlike 2001’s Brazil-inspired Agua, which the company performed at the National Theater four years ago, it is hard to see the link between the dance and the place. About the only thing clearly Italian was the funeral music used in one segment.
Palermo begins with a bang. The huge cinder block wall running across the stage, part of the set design by Peter Pabst, falls backward with a huge bang and clouds of dust, leaving debris that the dancers have to navigate over and around for the rest of the show.
A review of some dates showed that the piece premiered on Dec. 17, 1989, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps I was reading too much into it, but it makes about as much sense as the rest of the “stories” in Palermo — or the woman who alternates screaming “hug me” and then repelling the embrace.
Photo courtesy of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
The key to enjoying a Bausch production is not to try and make sense of the show, just let it be. It is like the adage about travel: it is not the destination that is important, but the journey itself. And Palermo was a wonderful journey.
It was terrific to see so many familiar faces — many of the dancers have been with the company for decades — and the silliness can be contagious, whether it’s the fractured telling of a convoluted tale, a fruit fight, a slap fest or a running gag about cooking eggs (and then “skin”) on an iron.
The few bits of dancing were invigorating, if too few and far between. The first extended sequence came right before intermission, leaving most of the audience unwilling to stir from their seats even as the house lights were turned on and doors opened because the dancers were still performing.
That unwillingness to leave was repeated at the end of the show, as the cast was given what would have been repeated curtain calls if there had been a curtain to be raised.
SAO PLUS, which I saw earlier in the same day, featured the writing and designs of calligrapher Tong Yang-tze (董陽孜), video projections by Chen Yan-ren (陳彥任), “choreography” by Horse (驫舞劇場) cofounder Su Wei-chia (蘇威嘉) and improvisational jazz by musicians Stacey Wei (魏廣皓), Kunter Chang (張坤德), Yohei Yamada and Guras Vadu, with dancers Huang Yung-huai (黃詠淮) and Shai Tamir.
Having missed last year’s Sao, I had nothing to compare this show to. However, other productions have capitalized on the interplay between the motion of the calligraphy brush and sinuous Chinese characters and dancers’ bodies and movements.
However, the key to SAO PLUS is that each element — Tong’s calligraphy, which fell from above the white backdrop or floated across it or sometimes puddled on the white floor, the musicians, who were stationed to the left of the stage, and the dancers —plays an equal role.
And it turned out that I have to use the phrase “choreographed by” Su rather loosely, because the piece was largely improvised by Huang and Tamir in response to the music and the projections. Both men are terrific dancers, and wonderful to watch, but their physical and technical differences made their solos and duets even more interesting.
There were two drawbacks to the show. The first is a personal failing — I do not like improvisational jazz and had to fight against being irritated by the music so I could enjoy the interaction of the dancers and the projections.
The second was the dreaded strobe segment, where a clash of harsh colors and strobe lighting was enough to trigger a migraine. I found myself writing why, why, why in my notes. Why do the creative teams of so many shows that include video projections feel the need to go strobe?
I had been eager to see Rosas again, after their amazing appearance with Rain at the National Theater almost nine years ago, but last Saturday night’s performance of Drumming left me feeling a bit deflated.
The dancers were in terrific form, the costumes and set were lovely, Steve Reich’s percussion-based score was interesting and its rhythms infectious, and the choreography combined mathematical rigor with playground fun, but I kept waiting for more of an emotional punch that never came.
Skipping, leaping and lines, again, again and again. In this case the parts were more enjoyable than the sum.
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