Perhaps Liu Kuan-hsiang (劉冠詳) was tempting fate a bit by naming his latest work, which opened at the Cloud Gate Theater in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水) on Friday last week, Karma (棄者).
It would seem that the gods were slightly displeased, as Liu and the Cloud Gate team found an end-of-July date a hard sell, despite the success of his show there last year under the auspices of the Horse (驫舞劇場) troupe and the resulting Performing Arts Award at the 15th Annual Taishin Arts Award in May.
Then the typhoons came. First the theater was forced to cancel Saturday’s night show because of Typhoon Nesat, then Tropical Storm Haitang put an end to Sunday’s matinee as well.
Photo: Courtesy of Liu Ren-haur
However, that left those who were able to see Friday’s show or Saturday’s matinee feeling very lucky indeed, for they had the chance to see something extraordinary.
A duet, Karma is more of a work in progress, but it is bold, brash, noisy, overwhelming and completely unique.
Like last year’s Kids (我知道的太多了) and 2014’s Hero (英雄), Karma is autobiographical, and that accounts for part of its rawness. Liu is willing to plumb the depths of love and despair, exploring the most basic and intimate of human relationships, be they with his parents or girlfriends — and the cycle of birth, life and death.
Photo: Courtesy of Chen I-tang
Liu is willing to strip himself bare in the pursuit of his voice and art, and that makes it impossible to look away.
Liu carried, dragged and rolled his partner Chien Ching-ying (簡晶瀅) around, often locked legs to waist or feet to neck, through a series of moves that drew upon Mayan sculptural iconography and well as the Kama Sutra, with one or the other repeatedly emerging out from under the other’s crotch.
He utilized Chien’s extreme flexibility to send her scuttling around like a spider, or dragging herself by her arms with her legs spread out horizonally. At times, her long hair hung down in front of her face, invoking images reminiscent of Japanese horror movies. At one point, she hung upside down over Liu’s back, lip-synching the lyrics of the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More.
After all, nothing says love like a Carpenters song to a large percentage of Taiwan’s population even though it has been more than 30 years since the pair’s last album.
Otherwise, most of the music for Karma was composed by Liu himself, including one long rap song.
Hopefully, he will get another chance to perform Karma in Taipei again. It is worth a second viewing.
CRAM COURSE FOR DANCE
Liu is one in a long line of fine dancers and choreographers who are graduates of Tsoying Senior High School in Kaohsiung, where two weeks earlier I attended the first of two performances that marked the culmination of this year’s International Young Choreographer Project (IYCP).
The project, which has been held annually in Taiwan since 1999, was moved from Taipei to Kaohsiung in 2005, under the auspices of the World Dance Alliance Asia-Pacific.
This year the three-week program brought together eight choreographers — three of them from Taiwan — to audition the dancers on July 2 and then create a new piece or reset a work for them. Each student had to perform in two works.
It is a challenging program for the choreographers, who have to very quickly evaluate the abilities and strengths of their cast and build a dance on them, and the students, who have to learn different dance styles and techniques.
I was somewhat familiar with two of the choreographers, thanks to last year’s Meimage Dance Company’s New Choreographer Project: German Jan Mollmer, who appeared with Tien Tsai-wei (田采薇) in an excerpt of their terrific duet, The Man, and Pingtung native Chien Lin-yi (簡麟懿), a former member of Jo Kanamori’s Noism troupe in Japan.
The others were Tamaki Mizuno from Japan, Australian Scotty Ewen, Mohd Fauzi Bin Amirudin from Malaysia, Texas-based South Korean Yeajean Choi and two more Taiwanese — Germany-based Huang Hsin-i (黃心怡) and Upock Quaqavan.
I was most impressed with Mollmer’s Displacement — a great romp set on five dancers involving a game of hangman, a wall clock, flashlight, portable blackboard and wheeled chair and a reproduction of a Degas ballet dancer painting. He kept the dancers and the audience on their toes.
Chien’s Duhkha was equally good, an examination of life and death, set on six dancers, that saw them move on, around, under and inside a table that turned out to be more of a coffin in the end.
Upock Quaqavan’s Lily, which drew on his Paiwan background, began with an explosion of power that ended up going nowhere. It seemed derivative of the work of another Paiwan choreographer, Baru Madiljin of the Tjimur Dance Theatre (蒂摩爾古薪舞集).
Amirudin’s All In was a jazz-flavored exploration of chance encounters that featured a lot of flat falls and jumps. It was well executed, but not very memorable.
Choi was the only one of the eight to add visual imagery to her piece, Turbulence, with a black-and-white pop-art film that provided context for the movement of the dancers even though it sometimes also obscured it.
Mizuno’s 10 Voices was an easy to watch piece, set on 10 girls, but did not break any new ground.
I liked the energy of Ewen’s piece, Falling Through Thunder Clouds and the two duets, but it also failed to live up to its initial promise.
Two students really stood out in the solos and duets created for them: Wu Shin-jie (吳欣潔), who has great strength and stage presence for one so young as shown by her dancing in Mollmer’s and Owen’s works and Kuo Chueh-kai (郭爵愷), with whom she shared a duet in Owens’ work. He also danced in Huang’s Panorama.
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