Germany-based Taiwanese choreographer Lai Tsui-shuang (賴翠霜) returns to Taipei’s Experimental Theater this week as part of the Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA).
Her troupe, Lais Creative Dance Theater (賴翠霜舞創劇場), will perform her latest work, Sound, Body, Memories (發聲) for four shows, starting tonight. The company was just at the theater in October last year with Blackout (記憶出軌), a collaboration between Lai and German dancer/choreographer Michael Hess that explored the issues of aging and losing memories.
The National Theater has invited her to create new works for its small theater twice before, as part of its New Idea Dance series, with Drawer (抽屜) in 2011 and Home Temperature (家‧溫 ℃) in July 2013, but this is the first time she has been asked to be part of a TIFA program.
Photo courtesy of Chou Chia-hwei
After graduating from the Chinese Culture University in 1995, Lai moved to Essen, Germany, to study for a diploma in dance at the Folkwang Hochschule or Folkwang Academy. She danced with the Folkwang Dance Studio in Essen from 1998 to 2000, then joined Daniel Goldin’s troupe in Munster for three years, followed by a year with the dance troupe at the Staatstheater Kassel, before striking out on her own as a freelance dancer and choreographer in 2004. She founded her own company in 2011.
As should be expected, given her training and career, Lai’s choreography and productions show the strong influence of the late Pina Bausch, another Folkswang alumni and a dominant force in German dance theater for several decades.
Although most of her professional life has been spent in Europe, Lai has created pieces for several Taipei-based companies over the years, especially the Assembly Dance Theatre (組合語言舞團), and been nominated for a Taishin Arts Award five times. She won in 2009 for Surround.
Photo courtesy of Chou Chia-hwei
Much of her work focuses on social issues, including environmental protection, and in recent years she has explored topics related to memory and physical movement.
Lai said this weekend’s show, Sound, Body, Memories, aims to physically decode the remains and echoes of memories, such as those evoked by listening to our own bodies — beating hearts, the sound of breathing, the creaking of aging joints — combined with the sounds of the city.
She wants to know what happens if we lose those sounds, lose the memories of them — do we lose the feelings that are attached to them as well?
Photo courtesy of Chou Chia-hwei
Set on five dancers, and performed to an electronic score, complete with a live DJ, Sound, Body, Memories sees the dancers encountering and responding to pure sound, acting as both receivers and transmitters and blurring the boundaries between technology and the human body. However, are the dancers reacting just to what they are hearing — or feeling — from the sounds, or are they also responding to memories triggered by those sounds?
To make the sounds for her production more three-dimensional, Lai collaborated with Frank Ching Ying, who has created a multichannel sound system for the Experimental Theater that uses a sensor to capture the kinetic energy of the dancers’ bodies and translate it into more sound.
Sound, Body, Memories runs for 60 minutes, with no intermission. The only remaining seats are for tomorrow’s afternoon showing.
Photo courtesy of the National Theater Concert Hall
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