In the past three years, dance lovers in Taiwan have had more opportunities to see the works they'd previously only heard of come to life on local stages.
The Novel Dance Series 2002 Plus is the brainchild of Lin Huai-min (
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NOVEL HALL
It was this desire to show dance's cutting edge that led Lin to invite dancer/choreographer Akram Khan to Taipei for a series of performances beginning Sept. 24., including the 27-year-old's first full-length production, Kaash.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NOVEL HALL
Born in London to parents from Bangladesh who insisted on handing down the traditions of their homeland, Khan began studying the 500-year-old classical Indian dance tradition of Kathak at the age of 7 under Kathak guru, Sri Pratap Pawar.
Kathak is the traditional dance of northern India which emphasizes the movements of the feet. Dancers decorate their feet with heavy bells and rotate to complicated rhythms. It is meant as a dramatic interpretation of Persian poetry and Indian mythology. Developed between 1526-1761, it has influenced other dance forms such as Flamenco.
The talented teenage Khan was no longer content with the traditional form and decided to learn contemporary dance at De Montfort University and later at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, England, where he recorded the highest marks ever for his Performing Arts degree. Before graduating, he had performed worldwide, including in Pandit Ravi Shankar's The Jungle Book, and in Peter Brook's Mahabharata.
In 1999, he worked with senior British choreographer Jonathan Burrows on a duet. As Khan later recalled, Burrow's commitment to dance as a medium in its own right and his attempts to integrate other media in his works influenced him greatly and marked a turning point in his career. In 2000, Khan spent six months participating in the X-group choreographic laboratory in Brussels along with other young dancers and choreographers from around the world. The experience helped him form connections between contemporary dance and traditional forms like Kathak.
Later that same year, he launched the Akram Khan Dance Company, which was soon invited to some of the world's most important contemporary dance festivals. For his work in 2000 he was awarded the Outstanding Newcomer to Dance Award by both the Critics' Circle-Dance Section and Time Out Live.
Not wanting to confine himself to the orthodox Kathak, he found inspiration from both Asian and Western dance forms and created something uncategorizable by era or culture. Khan calls his style "contemporary Kathak."
Currently a choreographer in residence at Royal Festival Hall, Khan has teamed up with celebrated sculptor Anish Kapoor and composer Nitin Sawhney in Kaash (Hindi for "if").
Set designer Kapoor is a British-Indian artist who has exhibited around the world over the past 20 years in venues such as Kunsthalle Basel and the Tate Gallery in London. He has participated in Documenta IX in Kassel and was awarded the Premio Duemila at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and the Turner Prize in 1991.
Sawhney co-created the comedy Secret Asians, which spawned the award-winning BBC television series Goodness Gracious Me. Following a tour with the James Taylor Quartet, he formed The Jazz Tones and collaborated with tabla player Talvin Singh in The Tihai Trio.
His enthusiasm for a new fusion of Indian and Western forms has been evident since his first solo album, Spirit Dance in 1993.
When Kaash debuted in London in May, it earned rave reviews. Khan credited the genesis of the work to "Hindu gods, black holes, Indian time cycles, tablas, creation and destruction." Khan leads four other dancers in his latest quest to connect contemporary dance and the classical Indian dance form.
"It is important that we remind ourselves of the value of that which we cannot touch. Is it not true that the empty space inside the cup is what renders it useful? Similarly, the stillness between steps, the spaces between musical phrases and the empty spaces in space itself contain all the mysteries of their eventual forms," Khan wrote in his notes on the piece.
The pieces Khan and his collaborators will present during their stay in Taiwan will be an exploration of this empty space and stillness.
Fix is a solo piece inspired by whirling dervishes and Sufism. Sawneys composed a meditative raga-based score for the work in which Khan whirls rapidly with arms flailing. In Loose in Flight, Khan choreographed from a unique approach -- "imagining the body being manipulated by 16 strings in space."
Kaash, which will go on stage next Friday, opens with a male dancer silently facing the void. A woman enters the stage and stands at his side. She breathes into his ear and all the other dancers appear suddenly. To dynamic chanting and drums, the dancers swirl around the stationary male. Their hands move energetically and their steps show tactful force.
In the background is Kapoor's thick, black square -- an imitation of a black hole painted on gauze. It is vibrant enough to serve as another character in the performance. Later the stage becomes enshrouded in crimson, pink and midnight blue, giving the audience the illusion that they are floating in space. Each dancer follows a different rhythm and pattern, creating an almost mathematical beauty.
With dancers serving as elements in the universe, the piece tries to illustrate what happens if the various theories regarding the beginning and end of the universe should come true.
The Akram Khan Dance Company will perform Loose in Flight, Fix and Rush on Tuesday, Sept. 24 and Kaash on Sept. 27 and 28 at Novel Hall, 3-1, Sungshou Rd., Taipei (台北松壽路3-1號). Performances start at 10pm. Tickets cost between NT$500 and NT$1,500 and are available at the venue.
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Power struggles are never pretty. Fortunately, Taiwan is a democracy so there is no blood in the streets, but there are volunteers collecting signatures to recall nearly half of the legislature. With the exceptions of the “September Strife” in 2013 and the Sunflower movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan and the aftermath in 2014, for 16 years the legislative and executive branches of government were relatively at peace because the ruling party also controlled the legislature. Now they are at war. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) holds the presidency and the Executive Yuan and the pan-blue coalition led by the