The latest 1+1 production at the National Theater on Saturday showed the value of the National Theater Concert Hall’s decision to offer a forum for choreographers whose small companies would rarely get the chance to perform on the big stage.
Ho Hsiao-mei (何曉玫) and Lin Wen-chung (林文中) took full advantage of the opportunity, presenting pieces that relied on big sets and production values that demonstrated new aspects their talent and creativity.
Ho’s Camouflage (假裝) showed a completely unexpected Pina Bausch dance theater side to her work — sans Bausch’s love of text — with a clever set by Jam Wu (吳耿禎) and Ho herself that featured a rhomboid-shaped room with white walls and flooring, a trapdoor and a large rectangular table on wheels.
Photo courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
The piece opened with a clash — of sound — that quickly quieted into crinkles of paper, as one female dancer slowly slid off a pile of what proved to be the other five dancers, each clad in a papery trench coat that provided the sound effects, foreshadowing the sounds they would create later in the piece by moving objects around on the table.
A woman is manipulated by the others around the stage and over the table, a dinner party is experienced again and again, dancers exchange roles and costumes — including a bit of gender reversal — pretty duets quickly take on an ugly edge and the men drop one of the women through trapdoor in the stage floor — only no matter what happens, they all remain trapped in the room, in the minutia of their live, with no escape.
Lin’s Aerodynamics (空氣動力學) was all about air and movement and was filled with beautiful images and flying, but suffered from deflated expectations because the opening montage of projections by Ethan Wang (王奕盛) — aircraft through the ages from a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, to a blimp, to the Wright brothers, to spaceships — was so amazing and cinematic (it even featured movie-like credits scrolling down the scrim) that what followed seemed to pale in comparison.
Photo courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
However, Lin said he wanted a layered effect, just like movies give, and he succeeded, with his 12 dancers moving about, between and behind long streamers that floated in the air. There were some motifs carried over from Lin’s last work, Long River (長河), where the dancers undulate in lines with hands linked to elbows, but the boxing-like segment that opened the piece showed a more martial side to Lin, and there were several well-executed duets and trios.
On June 6, Compagnie Accrorap gave an amazing performance at the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, showing why France has become one of the biggest interpreters and proponents of hip-hop dance over the past two decades.
Artistic director/choreographer Kader Attou’s 2013 production, The Roots, was mesmerizing from almost the opening scene, where a man in a cartoon-shaped armchair places the needle of a record player’s arm on an LP and then begins to move in the chair.
Each of the 11 men in the troupe is a terrific, fluid dancer, and Attou made sure they each had several chances to show their individual strengths, mixing extended solos with group sets.
The setting was simple, the slouchy, lopsided armchair and sofa, a long table, a few wooden chairs, a floor lamps, a record player and a coffee table that turned out to have a trampoline net at its center, which were frequently moved about — either by the men or on their own. The lighting (by Fabrice Crouzet) played a key role in scene shifts and mood changes.
It was a well-polished, beautifully executed show, set to score by Regis Baillet-Diaphane that leaned heavily toward cellos, violins and piano rather than the expected percussive or hip-hop music.
The hour-and-a-half show did drag on a bit once it got past the 70-minute mark, and I thought it could have easily finished with the beautifully-lit scene where all the men were spinning like tops, either on their shoulders or heads, their legs splayed for balance. It did not, and the bravura leaps and spins of the final scene did provide a reward for hanging on — as did the dancers’ enthusiasm when they pulled out cameras and started taking group shots of themselves and the audience at the curtain call.
The two disappointments were that the show was not better attended — the auditorium was about half full, and the dancers deserved more than that — and no programs were available, both of which are faults of the promoter, New Aspect Promotion.
Compagnie Accrorap has performed several times in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia, so there is hope that the troupe might be back someday soon.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s