The lapping of the waves, the fizzy hissing sounds as the water washes across the sand and then retreats; it is the sounds of the ocean as much as the movement and colors that stays in one’s memories.
It was the sounds and the floating underwater movements that stayed in my mind after seeing choreographer Bulareyaung (Bula) Pagarlava’s newest work, Colors (漂亮漂亮), for his Bulareyaung Dance Company (BDC,布拉瑞揚舞團) at the Cloud Gate Theater in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District on Saturday night.
That and just the sheer giggling fun the seven dancers had romping around the stage like they were spending a day at the beach.
Photo courtesy of Wang Zhengyi
Bula promised to bring the waters off Taitung and other slices of east coast life to Taipei audiences with the show and he did just that, as well as sharing the voices and dances of Taiwan’s Aboriginal communities.
Thanks to lighting/stage designer Li Chien-chang (李建常), Bula and his troupe were able to conjure up stunning scenes evoking the sea with nothing more than stage lights and large blue and white striped plastic tarps.
Three of the tarps were hung as the side and back walls, while another hung from battens in the rafters, serving at times as the sky or as the top of the water as viewed from beneath the waves.
Photo courtesy of Wang Zhengyi
The dancers spread the fifth one on the stage floor as the audience members took their seats. They later manipulated it to become rolling waves, and, by dragging it by one corner, created that fizzy sound of water on the sand.
Colors is proof that you do not need a lot of fancy gimmicks, or money, to create a striking show.
The men start the show clad in a variety of polo shirts or T-shirts, shorts or pants and colored rubber boots, like they had been helping with a post-typhoon clean-up in Taitung before deciding to hit the beach.
Colors begins simply, with Ponay Ngangiwan standing facing the audience, gently bopping as he quietly hums to himself. Then he explodes with a sudden thrust of his arms or a leg, or a quick jerk of the head, before he returns to the quiet bopping.
His colleagues watch from the floor for a few minutes, before, one by one, joining him and trying to mimic his movements, not always right on the beat, until there is a whole chorus line arrayed behind him.
The men remove their boots so they can “jump” into the ocean, rolling in, under and around the floor tarp, chasing one another around the stage and gradually stripping down to bathing suits, with Kevan Tjuljapalas and Giljigiljaw Tjaruzaljum egging everyone on.
Ngangiwan gets another solo turn as he wraps himself up in one corner of the tarp, looking like a model clad in an avant-garde couture dress, which he plays with and expands upon to the amusement of his comrades and the audience.
A dimming of the lights to a silvery glow and a nighttime world appears, later shifting to an underwater fantasy realm, with some skinny-dipping dancers.
Bula has crafted a series of vignettes, including a really lovely duet for Zhou Yu-rei (周堉睿), who danced despite an injured ankle, and Hsu Ting-wei (許庭瑋) and a solo for Huang Wei-jie (黃韋捷), before the lights came up and it was time for a closing party on the beach, complete with lots of singing and traditional Aboriginal line dancing, tabletop dancing and a great performance by Aulu Tjibulangan.
While Colors is not as emotionally powerful or choreographically strong as Bula’s other works, it is a fun show, one that transports the audience to the seaside, under the waves and back to dry land.
It is a show that makes everyone feel like they are spending time with friends, while showcasing the dancing, vocal and acting talents of the company’s dancers and that is a hard balance to achieve.
Colors is a good addition to BDC’s repertoire.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist