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.
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