There may be a hint of thunderstorms in the weather forecast for this weekend, but that is unlikely to deter Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) fans from taking advantage of the annual free performance by the company as part of the Cathay Life Arts Festival at the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall plaza tomorrow night.
This year the company will be presenting a mixed bill of four excerpts from longer works, mostly solos, and two short pieces by founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民). The show begins at 7:30pm but experienced hands know to bring a cushion, drinks and perhaps a picnic dinner, and get there early to ensure a good space on the tiles.
The evening begins with Adagietto, created in 1984 and set to Movement 4 of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5.
This will be followed by a solo for one of the company’s prima dancers, Chou Chang-ning (周章佞), from Cursive (2001) and a pas de quatre from Wild Cursive (2005), which will also serve as a reminder to dance lovers that the company will be staging a Cursive festival in the National Theater in September, performing all three works in the triology inspired by Chinese calligraphy between Sept. 2 and Sept. 20. It will be the first time that all three — the middle one is Cursive II — will be performed together.
Next on tomorrow’s program will be a solo by Huang Pei-hua (黃�? from Moon Water (1998), which is one of the troupe’s signature pieces. Then Dung Shu-fen (董淑芬) will dance the exquisite Requiem, which Lin created for the late Cloud Gate 2 director Lo Man-fei (羅曼菲) in 1989.
Requiem was conceived in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre and is a study in anguish as the dancer literally spins for the entire 10-minute work, only once showing her face to the audience. Cloud Gate is dedicating this weekend’s performance of Requiem as a memorial to 10th anniversary of the 921 Earthquake.
After an intermission, the company returns to perform the first half of Lin’s newest masterpiece, Whisper of Flowers, which premiered last September. Set to Yo-yo Ma’s (馬友友) recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello, the work is a celebration of youth and of spring, danced amid thousands and thousands of pink petals. It should send audience members home with a spring in their step.
Towering high above Taiwan’s capital city at 508 meters, Taipei 101 dominates the skyline. The earthquake-proof skyscraper of steel and glass has captured the imagination of professional rock climber Alex Honnold for more than a decade. Tomorrow morning, he will climb it in his signature free solo style — without ropes or protective equipment. And Netflix will broadcast it — live. The event’s announcement has drawn both excitement and trepidation, as well as some concerns over the ethical implications of attempting such a high-risk endeavor on live broadcast. Many have questioned Honnold’s desire to continues his free-solo climbs now that he’s a
As Taiwan’s second most populous city, Taichung looms large in the electoral map. Taiwanese political commentators describe it — along with neighboring Changhua County — as Taiwan’s “swing states” (搖擺州), which is a curious direct borrowing from American election terminology. In the early post-Martial Law era, Taichung was referred to as a “desert of democracy” because while the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was winning elections in the north and south, Taichung remained staunchly loyal to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). That changed over time, but in both Changhua and Taichung, the DPP still suffers from a “one-term curse,” with the
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 Nearly 90 years after it was last recorded, the Basay language was taught in a classroom for the first time in September last year. Over the following three months, students learned its sounds along with the customs and folktales of the Ketagalan people, who once spoke it across northern Taiwan. Although each Ketagalan settlement had its own language, Basay functioned as a common trade language. By the late 19th century, it had largely fallen out of daily use as speakers shifted to Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), surviving only in fragments remembered by the elderly. In
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan’s The Rip, a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie The Instigators there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is Miami Vice territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or The Town. In The Rip, they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon)
RSS