When it comes to Bollywood, or anything entertainment-related in India, Taiwanese tend to think of belly dancing, says Chan Yu-kuo (詹煜國). The 35-year-old dancer and Taichung native wants to change this view.
On Sunday night, his Shiva India Dance Group (西瓦印度舞團) performed classical Indian folk and Bollywood dance in a sold-out show at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall’s 400-seat lecture auditorium.
One aim of the program, Chan said in an interview last week, was to show how the dancing of Bollywood movies is connected to India’s ancient performing arts.
Much of the music on Sunday was modern Indian pop played from a CD (with a nice live music interlude of three musicians playing a sitar, tablas and harmonium), but the lively dance moves were traditional.
Shiva India Dance Group, whose dozen or so members are all Taiwanese, performed routines based on Kathak, a classical dance from Northern India that features intricate foot-tapping and hand movements, and mujra, a suggestive dance once performed by female courtesans for royalty and the upper class.
For Chan, a devotee of both forms, the visual aspect was equally important, with a costume change for each of the 13 dance pieces.
As the only male dancer, Chan dressed in traditional kurtas, while the women donned colorful, sparkling saris and lenghas, the skirt and blouse combination often seen in Bollywood movies. Chan had all of the clothes tailor-made in New Delhi.
“We want people to see the real India,” he said. “Not what Taiwanese people see as India, but what Indian people see as India.”
Shiva India Dance Group’s performance received support from the India-Taipei Association, India’s representative office in Taiwan, which helped to publicize the group’s show.
Chan, known by friends and students as “Ricky Q,” is a “passionate Indophile” and one among a growing number of Taiwanese with an interest in Indian culture, said Pradeep Rawat, Director General of the India-Taipei Association.
“In fact, there are more than 20 individual dance groups today in various cities of Taiwan passionately pursuing popular and classical Indian dance,” Rawat wrote in an e-mail to the Taipei Times.
An increasing number of Taiwanese are traveling to India for “culture-related tourism,” as well as showing interest in yoga and traditional Indian spas, according to Rawat.
Film has been another sign of a surging interest. Rawat said an Indian film festival organized by the association in January sold out in less than two days.
“More importantly,” he wrote, “starting last year, Indian movies are now being released commercially in local theaters.”
It was a Bollywood film that originally attracted Chan to Indian dance. He said the 2002 film Devdas inspired him to quit his job as an aerobics instructor and travel to New Delhi to study Kathak dance.
“I think that film had an important influence on creating ‘India fans’ in Taiwan,” Chan said. “We discovered that India was not what we were accustomed to seeing and that it was not poor and without joy.”
Chan was enchanted by the colorful dress, rich facial expressions and refined hand movements of the dancers he saw in Devdas, which led him to seek out the one of movie’s choreographers, Panjit Biriju Maharaj, a world-renowned Kathak dancer, poet and singer.
It took a full year of e-mail correspondence to convince Maharaj that he would make a devoted student. Since 2004, Chan has made yearly trips to New Delhi, spending three months out of the year to study with his “guru.” If it weren’t for financial and family obligations in Taiwan, Chan says, he would move to India.
He started Shiva India Dance Group in 2005 to teach and promote what he regards as “orthodox” forms of Indian folk dance.
Kathak, which depicts stories from Hindu mythology, has a distinctive rhythmic element — performers stamp their feet to match or play off the complex beats performed by onstage musicians, who commonly play sitars and tablas.
For Chan, Kathak’s biggest appeal lies in how it combines storytelling and body movement.
“You have to take a story and let the audience understand what’s happening just from your expression,” he said. “[A performer] will use his hand, just one part of his hand, to express a very specific thing — this attracted me very much.”
Kathak dance is beautiful for its “humanity and spirituality,” Chan said. “It lets me be myself.”
Shiva holds seasonal performances and offers classes on classical Indian folk and Bollywood dance. For more information, visit its Web site (in Chinese only) at tw.myblog.yahoo.com/shiva-dance/archive?l=f&id=25
For information on the India-Taipei Association, go to
www.india.org.tw
On Facebook a friend posted a dashcam video of a vehicle driving through the ash-colored wasteland of what was once Taroko Gorge. A crane appears in the video, and suddenly it becomes clear: the video is in color, not black and white. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake’s destruction on April 3 around and above Taroko and its reverberations across an area heavily dependent on tourism have largely vanished from the international press discussions as the news cycle moves on, but local residents still live with its consequences every day. For example, with the damage to the road corridors between Yilan and
May 13 to May 19 While Taiwanese were eligible to take the Qing Dynasty imperial exams starting from 1686, it took more than a century for a locally-registered scholar to pass the highest levels and become a jinshi (進士). In 1823, Hsinchu City resident Cheng Yung-hsi (鄭用錫) traveled to Beijing and accomplished the feat, returning home in great glory. There were technically three Taiwan residents who did it before Cheng, but two were born in China and remained registered in their birthplaces, while historians generally discount the third as he changed his residency back to Fujian Province right after the exams.
Few scenes are more representative of rural Taiwan than a mountain slope covered in row upon row of carefully manicured tea plants. Like staring at the raked sand in a Zen garden, seeing these natural features in an unnaturally perfect arrangement of parallel lines has a certain calming effect. Snapping photos of the tea plantations blanketing Taiwan’s mountain is a favorite activity among tourists but, unfortunately, the experience is often rather superficial. As these tea fields are part of working farms, it’s not usually possible to walk amongst them or sample the teas they are producing, much less understand how the
With William Lai’s (賴清德) presidential inauguration coming up on May 20, both sides of the Taiwan Strait have been signaling each other, possibly about re-opening lines of communication. For that to happen, there are two ways this could happen, one very difficult to achieve and the other dangerous. During his presidential campaign and since Lai has repeatedly expressed his hope to re-establish communication based on equality and mutual respect, and even said he hoped to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) over beef noodles and bubble tea. More dramatically, as explored in the May 2 edition of this column,