A group of dance students from Taiwan have been invited to perform at the Jose Limon International Dance Festival in New York City, which opens on Tuesday, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Limon Dance Company.
The two-week festival at the Joyce Theater features dancers from 16 companies and schools and from seven countries. The Taiwanese contingent, which leaves for the US today, is the only one from Asia.
What makes the invitation special is that the students are not from the powerhouse dance department at Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) or its older rival, National Taiwan University of Arts — the alma maters of so many of Taiwan’s best-known dancers and choreographers — but from the University of Taipei, formerly known as the Taipei Physical Education College before its merger with the Taipei Municipal Education College.
Credit: Courtesy of Sandy Ouyang
However, there is a strong connection between the University of Taipei and the Limon company in the form of assistant professor Wang Ru-ping (王如萍), who danced with the troupe for five years before returning to Taiwan and joining the academic world.
The links between Taiwan and the Limon company and school go back decades. Wang learned the Limon technique as an undergraduate at TNUA from Lo Man-fei (羅曼菲), who had studied at the Limon School in New York, while several other Taiwanese have danced with the company, including Yu Cheng-chieh (余承婕) and Lin Hsiang-hsiu (林向秀).
The piece that Wang’s students are to perform is a suite from A Choreographic Offering, something she is very familiar with, having performed the hour-long full-length work many times during her career. The suite is a 20-minute excerpt.
Wang auditioned and selected 16 dancers, who spend much of their summer vacation rehearsing the work, but for budgetary reasons, Wang could only pick 10 to go to New York: six seniors, two juniors, one sophomore and one freshman.
However, the full cast is scheduled to perform in May next year during the school’s annual concert.
At a rehearsal/press conference on Tuesday at the school’s campus in Tianmu (天母), Wang and the 10 students said they were nervous and excited about going to the festival.
“The performances are not just a show on stage, but a learning process” for the students, Wang said.
She said she has been telling the students to relax and not push themselves, since injuries have already forced her to make some cast changes — and required the students to learn each others’ roles in case last-minute switches are needed.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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