This year’s Innovation Series Dance ends this weekend with French choreographer Xavier le Roy’s 2007 solo, Le Sacre du Printemps.
The inspiration for the piece came from Le Roy’s watching the Berlin Philharmonic rehearse Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 2003. It raised several questions for him.
Do conductors, through their hand and arm gestures and body movements, lead an orchestra or is it the music leading the conductor? Are there differences in the way music is perceived by a conductor, the musicians and the audience?
Photo Courtesy of Xavier le Roy
Le Roy was also interested in the silence — the moment before a sound, before a conductor’s movement.
He began to analyze a conductor’s movements as if they were choreography and, in 2007, he premiered his own work, using Stravinsky’s title and a recording of the Berliner Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, with the sound design for the program by Peter Boehm.
■ National Experimental Theater (國家實驗劇場), 21-1 Zhongshan S Rd, Taipei City (台北市中山南路21-1號)
■ Tonight and tomorrow at 7:30pm, tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm; Tickets are NT$800, available at NTCH box offices, online at www.artsticket.com and convenience store ticket kiosks.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and