Ultima Vez is back in Taipei with a tale about life and death; or perhaps about death, with lots of life or lives in between.
Inasmuch as Life is Borrowed is an exploration of the human body -- that envelope that encompasses the soul during its time here on Earth -- and of the passions and mysteries that mark the beginning and end of the human experience.
Wim Vandekeybus, the director and choreographer of the Brussels-based Ultima Vez, explained that he was intrigued by the similarity of the beginning and end of a life.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIA
"Birth and death are the two extremes that we have no memory of. The biggest mystery is what comes after. Humans are so afraid of this big emptiness. This human passion for life, for knowing, goes against nature. Nature is indifferent to human passion."
It's 11 o'clock in the morning, and Vandekeybus, jet-lagged and much younger than expected, is getting animated about death. "Extremes are important for me. The more extreme, the closer death is."
He seems like such a nice guy, calmly adding more sugar to his coffee, it is hard to reconcile him with the images he is describing of blood, lots of blood, of blood pumping out of the body, of cut veins, of the heart pumping out the last moments of life.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIA
"I have a kind of catastrophic imagination," he says, smiling.
Vandekeybus isn't afraid that his subject matter will be too dark for audiences. "You have to see the complexity of things," he says.
To achieve this, Inasmuch as Life is Borrowed is two hours long, a mix of dance, film, music, acting and literature. The 11 dancers (three women, eight men) roll, they writhe, speak and hang from giant meat hooks suspended over the stage like overripe fruit from the tree of life.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIA
One dancer is "The Soul," who talks about all the lives he has lived, how he jumped from one body to the next, until he found himself trapped in a body that was dying and he couldn't get out.
On screen, a short film titled Inasmuch, written by Vandekeybus and Jan De Coster and directed by Vandekeybus, is projected behind the dancers. In the first part of the film, a baby is born, grows up within seconds and then dies an old man. In part two of the film, the old man is dying, and as he nervously awaits the great unknown, he remembers his life.
Death, Vandekeybus explains, was just a fact of his life growing up.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIA
"My father was a veterinarian. He came in after the farmers had done everything they could. I saw the extreme side of things in his work."
Vandekeybus's father himself was dying two years ago, about time he started to work on this piece. "He was dying during rehearsals," he said.
But, Vandekeybus insists, the piece is not about his father's death or his reaction to it. "I had this idea before ... The black thing, the darkness. It's a big part of life. It could be interesting. A piece should have something like this," he said.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TAIA
Vandekeybus says the creative process, for him, starts with a title, a theme. Physical danger, the human body, superstitions, nightmares -- these have all been inspirations for his previous work.
In one of his first pieces, the dancers moved on a fine line between performance and actual danger. They threw bricks to one another and bricks fell from above, just missing their heads.
"Now I work with the psychology of danger," he said.
"Before it was about real danger, tossing bricks. One dancer would toss a brick to another across the stage and you had to catch. The bricks were falling, you had to trust to have someone pull you out of the way," Vandekeybus said. "It was dangerous. Now I work with psychological danger. To provoke the movement -- the drama is in the movement."
Vandekeybus says he has often used his journal writings or short stories as a text for his choreography, but his pieces have always been a collaborative effort. He comes up with the idea and then he opens it up to the company.
This urge to hear what others think is essential to the creative process that has become a hallmark of Ultima Vez, and carries through to its dancers.
Vandekeybus says he likes to make dancers speak. "Sometimes people say `stop making dancers speak.' But I think when a person speaks, everything changes ... Many dancers have really never worked with text -- so I say, tell me a story. Sometimes top dancers get rejected in auditions because they can't speak."
The music came together as the rehearsals progressed. The score was composed by New York guitarist and composer Marc Ribot, who has gained fame working as a sideman with Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and John Zorn, moving from jazz to soul to Cuban.
Vandekeybus said he wanted to work with Ribot, whom he calls "the most in-demand guitarist in the world; a reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix," adding, "if Hendrix were still alive he would have been a perfect person for this piece."
Ribot has a "screaming" thing, a human touch, said Vandekeybus."He's really a craftsman, not afraid of a false tune, not caring if the strings break on his guitar."
"But I had to suggest a lot. He had no idea of how to work with choreography," Vandekeybus said.
Ribot sat in on some early rehearsals of the piece, then returned to New York to work on the music. Vandekeybus went to New York twice, "once to talk, once to record and mix the music."
Whenever possible, Vandekeybus prefers to stage Inasmuch as Life Is Borrowed with live music. "But it was not possible here. So we have a tape of a live performance," he said.
Now that he has covered life and death on stage, what is next for Vandekeybus?
"I really want to do a film, a feature film," he said. "I think that is what I will concentrate on next."
Performance Note:
Who: Ultima VEZ
What: Inasmuch as life is borrowed.
When: Tomorrow 7:30pm and Sunday 2:30pm.
Where: Taipei Social Education Hall
Tickets: Tomorrow NT$1,000 to NT$1,500, Sunday NT$900 to NT$1,000. Tickets from ERA ticketing.
From the last quarter of 2001, research shows that real housing prices nearly tripled (before a 2012 law to enforce housing price registration, researchers tracked a few large real estate firms to estimate housing price behavior). Incomes have not kept pace, though this has not yet led to defaults. Instead, an increasing chunk of household income goes to mortgage payments. This suggests that even if incomes grow, the mortgage squeeze will still make voters feel like their paychecks won’t stretch to cover expenses. The housing price rises in the last two decades are now driving higher rents. The rental market
July 21 to July 27 If the “Taiwan Independence Association” (TIA) incident had happened four years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have caused much of an uproar. But the arrest of four young suspected independence activists in the early hours of May 9, 1991, sparked outrage, with many denouncing it as a return to the White Terror — a time when anyone could be detained for suspected seditious activity. Not only had martial law been lifted in 1987, just days earlier on May 1, the government had abolished the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
Hualien lawmaker Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) is the prime target of the recall campaigns. They want to bring him and everything he represents crashing down. This is an existential test for Fu and a critical symbolic test for the campaigners. It is also a crucial test for both the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a personal one for party Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫). Why is Fu such a lightning rod? LOCAL LORD At the dawn of the 2020s, Fu, running as an independent candidate, beat incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmaker Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) and a KMT candidate to return to the legislature representing
RSS