Choreographer and dance professor Ku Ming-shen (古名伸) wants people to come see her new show, Decode 2010 (亂碼 2010) more than once. It’s the only way they will really understand what her company, Ku & Dancers (古舞團) is trying to do.
“Every evening has its own story,” she said in a telephone interview on Monday. “If you come to one, you say ‘Ah, that’s what it means, but when you see a second show, you will get the ‘juice’ of the show.”
There will be nine dancers, including Ku, and Claudia Queen, a US instrumentalist and composer for dance, who is in Taiwan thanks to a junior faculty summer research fellowship from the University of North Texas.
Each show will be different because they will be improvising each time. Although the 17-year-old company does perform set pieces, it is known for its improvisational work, which should be no surprise since Ku is the major proponent of Contact Improvisation in the country. Contact improvisation focuses on the physics of motion and contact between bodies.
This time, Ku says, audiences should expect the unexpected.
“We are going to try to communicate with each other. There are no ground rules,” she said. “In rehearsals, we had to break down, use some rules. In performances, we open up all the options. On stage our destiny will be created by each other.”
So what does that mean exactly?
“Everyone will play their own roles. I start to move, others will see me, respond, then they react,” she said.
“For the audience, participation is very important. To look at this kind of performance, you have to be open to see [new things]. The audience will have their expectations, but then they will be surprised as well,” she said. “Being real, that’s one of our principles. I want people to see real, we don’t want to pretend to be someone else; the present time is what’s important.”
It’s all about communication, she said, and trying to understand one another, which is where the show’s title came from.
“Working on computers, sending e-mails, when something goes wrong, you see all that code that you cannot read. So when we say ‘Body language,’ a lot of the time people say they don’t understand what we mean,” Ku said. “Movement has it own language — action and reaction. But when we try to use our logical minds [to decipher it], we don’t understand. It’s like trying to communicate from French to Chinese or English to German.”
It’s all about moqi (默契), she said, developing a common understanding, a common culture through dance.
“Some times in improvisation, people are disappointed that everything isn’t perfect. But that’s life,” Ku said.
Tickets for 70-minute-long Decode 2010 at the Experimental Theater this weekend are going fast; the only ones left are for tomorrow’s two shows. The company will also be performing for two shows next weekend in Fengshan in Kaohsiung County.
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