Dancer/choreographer Sun Chuo-tai (孫梲泰) has delivered another well thought-out, polished and humorous commentary on modern-day society — a meditation our growing dependence on all forms of electronics, with Electron (電子).
His 8213 Physical Dance Theater (8213肢體舞蹈劇場) performed at the tiny Guling Street Theater (牯嶺街小劇場). The space may be small, but it is perfect for the company’s very intimate pieces. You need to be close to see the performers’ expressions, the small twitches of the fingers, the vibrations of the body.
Sun’s caution last week not to sit in the front row because of the sweat that would fly was a good one. He and his two colleagues, American dancer/choreographer Casey Advaunt and Taiwanese dancer Yogi (Chan Tien-chen, 詹天甄), wore white, short-sleeved neo-prene scuba-diving suits that must have felt like saunas under the stage lights, but worked very well during the black-light segments that reduced the dancers to just their white shells.
Electron began with the three hooked up to white cords that connected them at the neck to a hook-up in the ceiling — very Matrix. From spasmodic heaves while lying prone on the elevated flooring, the dancers progressed to robotic mannequin moves until they were able to break free of the umbilical cords and explore their new world.
While the topic may have been weighty, Sun, as usual, used a combination of sight gags and verbal interplay to keep the audience smiling while making them think.
Near the end of the show, Sun sits on a stool, scuba suit pulled half-way down, wearing some kind of electronic headpiece and what turned out to be a vibrating belt around his waist (the kind that is supposed to help the wearer lose weight without actually exercising) and a remote control in each hand. He looks as majestic and stern as any mandarin in one of those old ancestor portrait scrolls, at least until he turned on the remotes and started to vibrate.
One last clever touch was that the show’s program was given out in the form of a DVD — so you needed an electronic device to read it.
Sun has frequently said that he will continue dancing and choreography until he feels that he has nothing more to say. Let’s hope he doesn’t run out of ideas anytime soon.
Just a few blocks away physically, but kilometers in terms of scale, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre performed their next-to-the-last show of their current run at the National Theater on Saturday night. Wild Cursive (狂草) was a fast-paced rendition of the final segment of company founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min’s (林懷民) Cursive trilogy.
Like watching a calligraphy master at work, Wild Cursive may appear spontaneous, but it is tightly controlled and well thought-out. The 70 minutes just flew by, almost in silence, so quiet was the audience. The score by Jim Shum (沈聖得) and Liang Chun-mei (粱春美) is a seamless mix of chirping crickets, waves, foghorns and temple bells, each perfectly complementing its particular segment without drawing attention away from the dancers or overshadowing their breathing, which is so essential to the piece.
Despite the solos and duets, at heart Wild Cursive remains an ensemble piece. Nevertheless, it was wonderful to see to see principal dancer Lee Ching-chun (李靜君), albeit in an all-too-brief solo. With the exception of her short piece in last week’s Cursive II (行草貳), she has been seen far too rarely on the National Theater stage in recent years.
The graphic black-and-white simplicity of the staging — from the scrolls of translucent rice paper that descend from the rafters with lines of ink slowly trickling down them, to the simple black costumes — provide the perfect setting for the dance. Kudos go to lighting designer Chang Tsan-tao (張贊桃), while credit for the staging goes to Lin Hwai-min.
Though some reviewers have called the piece “arid,” I relish its starkness, and it was wonderful to be able to see the full trilogy in one place.
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