It was almost a full house at the Metropolitan Hall on Saturday night for Chamber Ballet Taipei’s (台北室內芭蕾) The Door (門), including First Lady Chow Mei-ching (周美青), who found herself the focus of autograph seekers during intermission.
The Door was very different from the last couple of shows artistic director Allen Yu (余能盛) has done, although like last year’s Le Sacred du Printemps, he chose to divide the evening with two very different composers. Last year it was Mozart and Igor Stravinsky; this year it was Nino Rota and Sergei Rachmaninoff. This year’s combination worked well.
The Door is the strongest production Yu has done here in recent years, although the divide between the two halves was huge and Part Two was choreographically stronger than its flashier predecessor.
Part One told a variety of stories about the choices we make in life or that are made for us — there were aspiring dancers having to deal with rejection, politicians on the campaign trail, young girls being forced into prostitution, a soccer game and a young couple divided by the husband’s imprisonment.
The set was a variety of doorways — a revolving door, a cell door, a huge blue rectangular structure (the door to a career) and a large cut-out of a woman’s leg, bent at the knee to form the doorway that led to a brothel.
Yu spent just a few minutes to flesh out each of the story lines, and if you hadn’t read the program you would have had a hard time keeping up. When Daniel Cimpean shed his wig to show a shaved head, then disrobed and walked into a blindingly lit, smoke-filled opening in the back curtains, I’m not sure everyone realized he was meant to be turning his back on life to become a monk.
While the soccer game had a great slow-motion goal, some of the other segments were a bit heavy-handed. The “political Rashomon” had two almost cookie-cutter candidates, one with a green sash and one with a blue sash, who ended up being outmaneuvered by a rather evil-looking woman in red leading a small cadre of people with red armbands. Or perhaps I was reading too much into it.
Although some of the segments were clever and/or funny, there was too much overacting in this attempt at dance theater.
Part Two redeemed the program and would work well as a stand-alone piece.
The second half gave the imported dancers a chance to shine, and Nadja Saidakova and Richard Szabo made the most of it. Saidakova was flawlessly sleek; it was easy to see why she’s a principal ballerina back in Berlin. While Szabo got off to a slightly rocky start with some sloppy landings, he recovered well and his technique was flawless for the rest of the night. He was also dancing with a pulled muscle — made clear by the taping on his left ribs during the first act when he was bare-chested.
His fellow Hungarian, Nistor Laura, had mostly a supporting role, but she was absolutely lovely, with very clean lines and good technique.
The sets by Huang Jih-chun (黃日俊) and costumes by Lin Ping-hao (林秉豪) were great, contributing to a much higher production quality than in previous years. Huang’s different doors in Part One (I loved the leg) were well-matched by the cheekiness of Lin’s designs, just as the deceptively simple gray walls of moveable doorways he created for Part Two were balanced with Lin’s clean line of unitards and leotards with net skirts.
Among the local dancers, Chuang Yuan-ting (莊媛婷), Hung Chia-lin
(洪嘉鈴), Kang Pin-ju (康邠如), Kao Yung-yu (高永煜) and Chuang Shih-hisen (莊士賢) stood out.
However, I found myself wishing that more of the Taiwanese dancers had picked up pointers from Laura and Szabo. Laura smiled her way through — when appropriate — and looked out at the audience, while most of her fellow corps members rarely looked up, much less out into the theater. As for several of the men, their haircuts had more attitude and crispness than their footwork. Szabo, on the other hand, appeared totally committed whether acting or dancing, and that’s what makes him worth watching.
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