It has been too long since Taipei audiences have seen Taiwanese dancer/choreographer Lin Hsiang-hsiu’s (林向秀) work, much less seen her dance. This weekend, they will be able to see both, as the Lin HH Dance Company (林向秀舞團) and sjDANCEco, a San Jose, California-based troupe, present Hungry Heart (心之所向) at Zhongshan Hall as part of the 17th Taipei Arts Festival (2015台北藝術節).
Lin studied and worked in the US for several years — including being a charter member of the Limon West Dance Project early in her career and also danced with the Limon Dance Company.
She founded HH Dance in Taipei in 2003 and over the next few years produced several intriguing works, including East & West/Mix & Match(混東西) in 2005, Believe Or Not(信不信由你) in 2006 and The Other Side of Darkness (光的另一邊) in 2008.
Photo Courtesy of Bob Shomler
In 2009, she moved back to California with her family — Lin had earned a bachelor’s in dance and a master’s degree in performing arts at the San Jose State University — after she was invited to be the company choreographer for sjDANCEco, a troupe with strong connections both to the university (several members are on faculty there) and the Limon Dance Company.
She has stayed in touch with Taiwan’s dance world on visits home and has created several works for the Kaohsiung City Ballet (KCB, 高雄城市芭蕾舞團), whose founder, Chang Hsiu-ru (張秀如), was not only Lin’s first dance teacher, but is also her aunt.
Lin said Taipei Arts Festival director Keng Yi-wei (耿一偉) had been talking to her for a while about bringing her works to Taipei, but she felt it would be difficult because “they were choreographed on my American dancers and dance partner of more than 20 years — all from the ‘Limon family.’”
Photo Courtesy of Chen Chang-chih
However, Keng’s idea became more feasible this year because the Jose Limon Dance Foundation is marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Limon Dance Company — with an International Dance Festival in New York City in October — and additional funding became available to bring sjDANCEco members not only to Taipei, but to the New York show as well, thanks to a grant from the Applied Materials Foundation.
The founder and co-artistic director of sjDANCEco, Gary Masters, is in Taipei, not just for this weekend’s shows, but also to give masters’ classes to local dance students. Others from the troupe who will be performing are co-artistic director Maria Basile, Heather Cooper and guest dancer Raphael Boumalia — a principal with Limon company.
Lin also invited her long-time dance partner Robert Regela, who performed in Taiwan with Lin in Believe Or Not and Limon’s The Exiles, as well as former colleagues Chen Pei-yu (陳貝瑜) and Chen Wei-ning (陳維寧) to join the show.
The highlight of the 85-minute-long program is Master and Boumalia’s 2012 reconstruction of one of Limon’s signature works, The Moor’s Pavane (1949), which the Mexican choreographer based on William Shakespeare’s Othello, with the four dancers representing Othello (the Moor), Desdemona, Iago and Emilia. The two men won an Isadora Duncan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Restaging/ Revival/Reconstruction last year for the production and the cast of that show will be performing it this weekend.
Three of Lin’s works are on the program — Mix&Match, a 2009 duet for Regela and herself; Keyed, a 2012 duet created by Boumalia and Lin, and a restaging of 2013’s Shards (碎玻璃). Rounding out the show is an excerpt from Basile’s Tango Fatal.
Lin returned to Taipei early last month to audition dancers for the new version of Shards. In addition to wanting a larger cast — 22— for the piece, which is focused on the energy of young people and demonstrations, Lin wanted to add a special touch.
“We also auditioned anyone who had taken part in street demonstrations and chose six,” she said in a telephone interview on Sunday.
Saturday night’s show will include a post-performance talk focusing on The Moor’s Pavane and Shakespeare’s Othello.
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