Dancer-choreographer Lin Wen-chung (林文中) and his WCdance troupe are launching their second national tour this weekend in Taipei with Small Dances (情歌), Lin’s second creation for his two-year old troupe.
Lin is trying something that few of the smaller dance companies in Taiwan do — build up a repertoire so that his productions are not just seen for a few performances in Taipei and then disappear into the ether, lost to dance fans except for a few YouTube clips. So far the plan is to present a new work each year in Taipei, and then take it on tour around the country six months to a year later.
He tried it with his inaugural piece Small (小) last fall and it appears to have paid off.
Most smaller companies can’t afford to do this both because of the expense involved in traveling and because the sets and props aren’t usually designed to be moved from one theater to another. Lin has gotten around the problems by creating works that are portable. With Small, the staging centered on a Plexiglas cube. When the piece premiered at the Crown Theater, those in the front row on the floor were just about 2m away from the cube. When the company took the piece on the road last year, at Wenshan for example, the cube was centered in the middle of the stage, while the audience was much further away.
This shift didn’t change the way the company performed the work, or the impact of the piece, it simply provided a different perspective from which to view it.
When Small Dances premiered in May last year at the Experimental Theater in Taipei, Lin and his crews worked for several days to reconfigure the seating space in that theater so the audience surrounded the dancers on three sides, with a white, 20cm-high platform in the center. It will be interesting to see what he does with that platform on this tour.
Small Dances, the Chinese title for which translates more aptly as “love songs,” is a light romantic look at relationships, set to an intriguing mix of songs by the Mexican American singer Lhasa de Sela, the song P.S. I Love You from the film of the same name, Love You to Death from Cape No. 7 (海角七號), a nanguan (南管) piece, excerpts from Handel and Mozart and Song to the Moon from the Czech opera Rusalka.
It was very different from Lin’s earlier, edgier work, filled with terrific little pas de deux and group sets. My only complaint was that Lin created most of the choreography for his five dancers and we didn’t see enough of him.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
Jan 13 to Jan 19 Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed. “Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定). “Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.” Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th
RSS