Two of Taipei’s smaller contemporary dance companies will be almost neighbors this weekend with performances in the capital’s main “black box” venues that center on the themes of senses and reality.
Jade Dance Theatre (JDT, 肢體音符舞團) is taking over the Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre for its annual production, titled iShade (木目蒙) — part of its Dancing Dreams Series — while Jeff Hsieh Chieh-hua’s (謝杰樺) Anarchy Dance Theatre (安娜琪舞蹈劇場) will perform In Freedom (去自由) at the Experimental Theater as part of the NTCH Dancing in Autumn series.
JDT’s “Dancing Dreams” series for young choreographers, which began four years ago, sets two requirements: a work has to be related to social phenomena and it must connect with “the common feelings of general public.”
Photo Courtesy of Chang Chen-chou
This year’s show features two duets, Appearance by Lin Chun-hui (林春輝), a choreographer who worked with the troupe in 2012 and 2013, and Shade by Hsu Wei-lin (許瑋玲). The two works are connected by a single question: How do we know what is real?
Lin was inspired by the recent consumer food and environmental wastewater scandals that left the public wondering who and what to believe when so many people appear to have two sides and politicians use words to hide and evade.
Hsu’s work, which questions the notion that what we see is reality, comes from an even more personal place — four years ago she lost her eyesight for six months. She has her two dancers perform the same movements, first wearing blindfolds and then without.
Photo Courtesy of Jade Dance Theatre
It is no wonder that the works of Hsieh, the architecture student turned dancer/choreographer, are usually concerned with structures and spatial utilization as well as the web of human relationships.
The company’s last project, Women (Chinese for “we” — 我們), at Huashan 1914 Creative Park in May saw Hsieh and his dancers/collaborators playing around with large wooden blocks and ended up with them all in a water-filled clear plastic cube of water.
In Freedom promises to be something altogeher different.
Hsieh began In Freedom two years ago after returning from a seven-month artistic Cite International des Arts residency in France. Over the past two years he asked his dancers a lot — a lot — of questions: Are you free? How do you define freedom of movement, freedom of body, freedom of emotion? Are you aware of restrictions? Are you aware of your awareness? What is the maximum limit of liberation?
He says he sees physical liberation as a way of constructing and deconstructing the relationship between the body, space and theater — but leaves it up to both the dancers and the viewers to decide what freedom means to them.
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