The Meimage Dance Company’s New Choreographer Project (鈕扣New Choreographer計畫) show at Taipei’s Huashan 1914 Creative Park last weekend once again demonstrated the power and allure of one of Taiwan’s premier exports — its professional dancers and choreographers.
The project’s seventh edition featured Tung Po-lin (董柏霖), a dancer with London-based Company Wayne McGregor; Liu I-ling (劉奕伶), who is with the New York City-based Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Tu Lee-yuan from GoteborgsOperans Danskompani in Sweden.
The program opened with Tung’s reflective solo, Why does he want to leave? (為甚麼他要離開), which began with him seated on the floor at the front of the Umay Theater’s small stage singing and playing guitar, before a short video projected onto the rear wall started.
Photo: Courtesy of Terry Lin
The rather quiet and unconventional beginning to the dance belied the dynamism of Tung’s choreography, which made full use of his arms, precise footwork and ballet training.
It was interesting to reflect how after just a year of working with McGregor, the British choreographer’s penchant for sharply articulated legs, feet and arms appears to be rubbing off on Tung.
Liu’s piece, Gung (更), also saw her singing a bit, but her years in New York, straddling different cultures, both societal and dance, made for a work that began as soft and funny, even wistful, before turning into a provocative dance of assertive empowerment.
Photo: Courtesy of Terry Lin
The transformation was highlighted by the costume change from a very girlish pink dress (with matching shorts), red belt and strappy red sandals that the shaven-headed Liu wore before discarding them in favor of a crimson jersey top and grey sweatpants.
Jones’ sometimes confrontations story-telling style was also reflected in Liu’s piece.
The standout on the program was the final work, Tu’s It Takes Two to Tango, which he performed with one of his Goteborg colleagues, Jan Spotak, a Slovakian-born dancer/choreographer.
There was no singing, at least by the two men, but a lot of comedic and physical interplay based on the pair’s height differential, along with a tea cup and saucer, plus some very fine dancing.
Tu set his piece to a score that ranged from Caetano Veloso’s Cucurrucucu Paloma to Woodkid’s Run Boy Run and Arcade Fire’s Song on the Beach.
It Takes Two to Tango opens with Tu and Spotak kneeling facing one another, one arm raised across their chest and pressed against the other’s, a cup and saucer balanced atop the two limbs.
Their torsos swayed and bodies circled one another without ever losing contact or the cup and saucer, before they effortlessly rose, still locked to one another and the porcelain.
Initially they always stayed in close contact, with Spotak lifting Tu, raising him over his shoulders and around his body, dragging him around or carrying him in his arms like fallen angel.
The pace shifted from slow and relaxed to fast and fluid and Tu also had a chance to manipulate his taller partner.
The alternating dynamics between the pair, their physical exuberance and the playfulness of the choreography made for a very engaging piece and a great introduction to Tu’s works. I would like to see more.
The New Choreographer Project show will be performed in Yilan County tomorrow and Saturday at the Chung Hsing Cultural Creative Park (中興文化創意園區) in Wujie Township (五結). The shows start at 7:30pm and are free.
Last weekend also proved to be a good one for Taiwanese choreographer Benson Tsai (蔡博丞) and his B.DANCE (丞舞製作團隊) troupe, with Tsai scoring yet another win in an international choreographic competition, this time in Switzerland.
First prize at the Tanz-Plattform Bern was awarded to Tsai’s Innermost and L‘aveuglement by the Belgian-based duo of Victor Launay and Sara Olmo, who are collectively known as Les Vikings.
The first place win comes with a commission to create a work about by Albert Einstein for the Dance Company Konzert Theater Bern to premiere in May next year.
The Bern jury praised Innermost’s “colorful, exciting and also humorous choreography.”
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
It’s fairly well established that strength training is helpful at every age: as well as building muscle, it strengthens tendons and ligaments, increases bone density and seems to have protective effects against everything from osteoporosis to dementia. But a new study based on data collected over two decades in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, suggests that another physical attribute might be just as important — and it’s one that declines even faster than strength as the years go by. The good news? It might also be less uncomfortable, and even slightly safer, to improve. Also, it will probably make you better
RSS