Sankai Juku, the Paris-based Japanese butoh troupe, has returned to Taipei for the first time in almost a decade.
The 42-year-old troupe, founded and led by artistic director Ushio Amagatsu, will be at the National Theater for two shows, tomorrow and Saturday, of his 2015 production Meguri (回) on the company’s fifth visit to Taipei.
Sankai Juku was last in Taipei in at the end of August 2008 with Kagemi — Beyond the Metaphors of Mirrors, which was inspired by an installation of lotus leaves at an ikebana exhibition that Amagatsu saw in the 1970s.
Photo: Courtesy of Sankai Juku
Butoh, for the uninitiated, is a Japanese dance theater form that began to evolve in the 1950s as an exploration of the shamanistic elements of traditional Kabuki and Noh theater, and Western modern dance as part of an effort to counter the influence of US cultural dominance by seeking a return to a more spiritual, primitive art form. Bu (舞) means dance in Japanese, while toh (踏) is to stamp on the ground.
Its originators were also influenced by meditation and traditional martial arts as shown in the mixing of slow, almost glacial movements and sharp, quick, even playful ones. However, there is no one school of butoh, for each style is an idiosyncratic as its originator.
In many ways, Amagatsu’s style of butoh reminds me of Legend Lin Dance Theatre (無垢舞蹈劇場) founder Lin Lee-chen’s (林麗珍) work: the shaven-head performers’ bodies encased in layers of alabaster white body paint that obliterates their identities; costumes and stage designs that range from monastic to opulent; slow tranquil movements interrupted by bursts of energy; the austere otherworldliness, almost religious sensibility, of the performances.
Photo: Courtesy of Sankai Juku
Both Amagatsu and Lin have put their modern dance training to use to create their own movement vocabularies that emphasize amazing physical control. The stillness of the dancers also serves to force audience members out of their busy everyday lives into a more hypnotized, dreamlike state where time becomes immaterial. Nothing can be rushed, one just has to sit back and watch.
The subtitle of Meguri is “Teeming Sea, Tranquil Land,” which pretty much sums up the message that Amagatsu is trying to get across.
The set design, judging from photographs and videos, is stunning: a massive, textured wall relief of Paleozoic fossilized crinoids — a marine animal sometimes called a sea lily because of its resemblance to the flower — that looms over the sandy floor, with a smattering of small wooden platforms.
As usual, Amagatsu has divided Meguri in seven sections — seven is a constant motif in his works. The scenes depict the cyclical patterns of nature such as the circulation of water, the four seasons, the transitions of the Earth as well as his continued interest in a “dialogue with gravity.”
The eight performers, including the 68-year-old Amagatsu and veterans Semimaru, Toru Iwashita and Sho Takeuchi, walk, crawl, sometimes in unison, sometimes solo, specks of powder floating off their bodies as they spin, to a score composed by Takashi Kako, Yas-Kaz and Yoichiro Yoshikawa that ranges from quiet percussive beats and strings to lush orchestrations.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50