Local dance troupes have presented some challenging works over the past few weeks, works that showed their dancers to good, if not great, advantage, even if there were some choreographic hiccups. For the most part, it was the dancers, not the audience who faced the challenges, and they handled it very well.
I missed Dance Forum Taipei’s (舞蹈空間) Moving with Shimazaki (徹舞流) shows at Taipei’s Wellspring Theater (水源劇場) from April 8 to April 10, but am very glad I made the trip to the Jhongli Arts Center (中壢藝術館) in Taoyuan on April 15 to catch up with the troupe.
The program featured three pieces by Japanese choreographer Toru Shimazaki, a frequent collaborator, and showed just how good the company’s dancers are, at times surpassing the limits of the choreography.
Credit: Courtesy of Chen Yo-wei
The show opened with Grace, which the troupe premiered in October 2009, a lovely dance that sends its eight performers through a series of duets that stress control, strength, balance and partnering, set to a piano-digital score by Ryuichi Sakamoto and German composer Alva Noto.
It begins with the dancers initially wearing head pieces that look like fencers’ masks by Atelier Yoshino, which gave them a non-human image and made it sometimes difficult to tell if the partnerships were mixed sex or single sex.
It was nice to see Grace again; Taiwan’s smaller troupes rarely have the money or the opportunities at home to revive a piece from their repertory.
Credit: Courtesy of The Best Crew Dance Studio
I was less impressed with the new work on the program, The Game, a testosterone-laden work for three men that was an abrupt change of pace after Grace. The three ran through a varied sequence of mock battles that mixed strength with beauty and saw bodies tumbling over one another or tossed about. There was no overt hostility; the three could have been brothers or close friends acting out youthful bravado.
The final work, 2014’s Zero Body was a 30-minute tour de force by the company’s nine women, dressed in black tops and short skits. They performed a series of almost military drill-like sequences, sometimes as an ensemble, sometimes with a trio or a pair at odds with the others, but always with tight, tight, tight precision. Arms rotated like a field of whirl-a-gigs as legs paced or slide across the stage, the dancers moving in complex lines and timing.
Sun-Shier Dance Theatre’s (三十舞蹈劇場) show at the Wenshan Theater (文山劇場), in Taipei on Saturday afternoon last week was a quieter and more uneven affair, but choreographer Lin Yi-jie (林依潔) walked a fine line between pathos and comedy in her The Place: a Puppet, a Closet, a Fantasy (所在-人與偶幻化的奇特空間).
The work opens with black-clad dancers arranged in a semi-circle on the floor around a large metal cube frame, with a large, headless puppet reclining inside the cube. The dancers, using black poles, manipulate the blanketed puppet as it restlessly snoozes before “coming to life” — soaring in and around and to the top of the cube.
The fun turns a bit nightmarish when the puppet, devoid of clothing, confronts a young male dancer clad as the puppet once was. The puppet alternates between caressing the dancer and abusing him and ends with its trying to drag him back into the closet — however one might want to interpret that imagery.
For someone whose childhood nightmares consisted of creatures lurking in bedroom closets, be they zombies, vampires, or witches, all ready to drag you off into the closet and unknown horrors, it was more than a bit disquieting.
Fun returns in the later vignettes, which see the dancers hanging from suit coats hung from the top rail of the closet, dancing out episodes and encounters from the daily lives of the people who wear them.
I had no idea what to expect when I walked into the Taipei City Government Family Theater on Saturday night to see Dreamer, The Best Crew Dance Studio’s (TBC舞蹈休閒館) collaboration with theater director Hsieh Shu-ching (謝淑靖); perhaps something along the lines of the Step Up movies.
I also wondered if I might be one of the oldest members of the audience.
The appearance of what had to be the grandparents and parents of several of the performers quickly disabused me of that notion, and Dreamer turned out to be an enjoyable family-oriented production that was a cross between Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and any number of Taiwanese television soap operas involving young love and dysfunctional family dynamics.
The storyline was populated by construction workers, teenage students, sidewalk accessory vendors, bank robbers, policemen, thugs, a scholar-robed magician, sharp-suited businessmen and would-be dancers — and was as convoluted as that assortment sounds.
Not to mention a male dancer — Hsu Wei-chieh (徐偉傑) — in drag in the second act as a long-suffering, shrewish housewife, clad in a curly wig, pink Hello Kitty bathrobe and granny shoes; certainly an “only-in-Taiwan” breakdancing character.
The first act is a fast-paced series of short sequences, setting up what proves to the story’s arc shown in the second act — a young wannabe breakdancer is hit by a car accident, dies and is then escorted by a magician who shows him a series of could-happen incidents, included a youngster’s conflicts with a hard-drinking father, before it all turns out to be a dream and ends with the whole cast on stage to take individual spins and breaks.
The score by composer Lee Che-yi (李哲藝) was much softer than expected, blending Western orchestration with erhu (二胡) and pipa (琵琶) segments, while the set design by Huang Jih-chun (黃日俊) gave the dancers three levels to perform on.
It was a good start for a first attempt at a breakdancing theatrical production by TBC, my main complaint being that they and Hsieh tried to squeeze too much into the show, with the dancing often given short shrift. Too often the dance sequences were just picking up pace when they ended and the storyline moved on.
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