There is a substantial amount of dance going on around Taiwan this weekend, from Taipei to Kaohsiung, from small festivals to major appearances by foreign companies dancing works by Taiwanese choreographers.
One of the most eagerly awaited productions is that of the TANZLIN.Z company from Linz, Austria, which will perform Yilan County-born choreographer Lin Mei-hong’s (林美虹) The Little Mermaid at the National Taichung Theater (NTT) on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
While Lin is known in Taiwan, her career has been in Europe, where she has lived for more than four decades, first as a dance student and later as artistic director of German municipal ballet companies in Plauen, Dortmund and Darmstadt. She moved to Austria in 2013 to head the TANZLIN.Z at the Landestheater Linz.
In addition to her works for those companies, she has also choreographed for operas, musicals and plays in Germany, Austria, France, Spain and Sweden.
Eight years ago she brought the Tanztheater des Staatstheaters Darmstadt to Taipei’s National Theater to perform her 2009 production, Schwanengesang (“Swan Song”). It was the first time one of her European dances had been performed in Taiwan and the dance-theater production, inspired by Belgian poet George Rodenbach’s 1892 novel Bruges-la-Morte, left audiences eager to see more of her work.
For The Little Mermaid production, which premiered last year, Lin combined the Hans Christian Andersen classic tale of a mermaid princess who falls in love with a human prince, and Oscar Wilde’s The Birthday of the Infanta, a story about a dwarf who falls in love with a beautiful princess and is mocked as a result.
The common thread linking the two ballets is the frustrations encountered by the main characters’ pursuit of love and their destructive internal struggles in the face of rejection.
The show, set to a score by Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, with costumes and sets by Dirk Hofacker and lighting by Johann Hofbauer, won this year’s Austria Music Theater Prize.
It will be performed in Taichung’s Grand Theater and runs 100 minutes, with a 25-minute intermission.
Many people have complained about the National Taichung Theater’s programming of two dance productions at the same times on weekends, instead of staggering the shows so that people traveling from Taipei or elsewhere could see both in one day if they wanted, a scheduling system in evidence during the Taiwan International Festival of Arts (TIFA) program this spring.
Someone appears to have heeded the criticism, and so people who want to see Lin’s show as well as Beijing-based TAO Dance Theater’s (陶身體劇場) show 5 and 9 in The Playhouse can do so on Saturday, as TANZLIN.Z is performing a 2:30pm matinee and TAO’s first performance is at 7:30pm. On Sunday, both troupes will perform at 2:30pm.
TAO, founded in March 2008 by dancers Tao Ye (陶冶), who was then just 23, and Wang Hao (王好), made its Taiwan debut in April 2014 as part of the Novel Hall Dance Series in Taipei, and were back again in November 2016 at NTT and then again last year to perform at the Cloud Gate Theatre in New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水).
Tao’s choreographic style is minimalist and unique, the movements building on overlapping circular forms, with the dancers — uniformly clad and with closely shaven heads — often maintaining close physical connections with one another, appearing to move in a united form to the point where it is difficult to know where one begins and another ends.
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