Horse (驫舞劇場), Taiwan’s one-time all-male dance ensemble, has gradually been adding women to its casts. However, for the company’s latest production, Duets (兩對), which opens tonight at Taipei’s Experimental Theater, cofounder and artistic director Chen Wu-kang (陳武康) decided on an entirely new approach.
“It was very convenient for us to decide to do two duets,” the 37-year-old Chen said in a telephone interview on Monday night. “There are two married couples in the company.”
However, the dancing ideals of both couples are different, he said, referring to himself and his 32-year-old wife, Yeh Ming-hwa (葉名樺) — who just finished her own production, Nordic at Taipei’s Songshan Cultural and Creative Park last weekend — and their collaborators, Liu Kuan-hsiang (劉冠詳) and his wife, Chien Ching-ying (簡晶瀅), who are both 27.
Photo courtesy of Horse
“So we each did our own duet, then came together,” Chen said, adding that they have extended the separate, then combined format into the actual performances.
Tonight and tomorrow each pair will dance their own duet, with an intermission separating the two pieces. However, Saturday and Sunday’s shows will see the two couples sharing the stage, performing their duets in parallel.
“We just have to work out some of the traffic details,” he said, adding, “as usual, we like a challenge.”
Photo courtesy of Horse
Throwing in a reference to the late US comedian George Carlin’s riff on people working so hard on their self-confidence that they could no longer work in groups or together, Chen said a duet is the smallest group form to work with.
“With three people, you get politics,” he said.
“Ming and I have known each other for 21 years, but never really danced together,” he said. “In the beginning, I thought it [their duet] would be about our relationship, but it’s not… So we came up with three sections, each related to another section, either a pair or opposite.”
Liu’s piece is about an even more intense, and fraught, relationship, he said.
“It is about the experience of taking care of his mother in a hospice over the past eight months, washing his mother’s vagina day after day,” Chen said.
Taiwan-based French sound artist Yannick Dauby, who is artist-in-residence with Horse, has provided the score for both duets.
Liu’s piece uses a lot of his own voice, enhanced by Dauby, Chen said, while for his and Yeh’s duet, “we kind of jammed together, we have a base and are kind of improvising on that.”
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