When Su Che-hsien (蘇哲賢) studied at the Graduate School of Applied Media Arts (應用媒體藝術研究所) of the National Taiwan University of Arts (台灣藝術大學) three years ago, he came up with the idea of making a documentary about a subject that is an emblem of youth culture but is rarely captured on film. He embarked on a field study at places like Shuanglian MRT Station (雙連捷運站), Ximending (西門町), Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (國父紀念館) and Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂), where teen street dancers congregate and practice after school.
Su located and talked to professional dance groups and student clubs at high schools, but found the former too “business-like” and the later, with their insistence on tradition and good grades, too “fascist.” The young filmmaker was determined to make a movie about “passion and dreams,” not a “Discovery-channel program on Taiwan’s street dance,” to use his own words.
Three years of researching, filming and post-production later, Hip-Hop Storm (街舞狂潮) will hit the big screen today as a highly entertaining tale of two groups of street dancers in Taiwan.
Photo courtesy of CNEX Foundation
Su’s months of searching for the right subjects paid off. The movie opens with Peng Ying-lun (彭英倫), aka Alun (阿倫), a street dancer for 20 years who has devoted himself to vernacular dance, travelling to Osaka, New York and Brazil to hone skills and immerse himself in dance cultures. Considered a grandpa by local street-dance standards, the 34-year-old started to teach house dance when no one had ever heard of the style in Taiwan and has tried to promote dance culture by holding competitions and workshops taught by international street dance champions, often paid for out of his own pocket. Alun’s biggest wish is to compete at the Juste Debout, a world-class dance competition held every year in Paris.
The other group, Undergradu-Eight (八個小孩), is very different. It is a hip-hop group made up of eight teenagers from five high schools. After the college entrance examination, the young dancers team up again for the upcoming Metro Street Dance Competition (捷運盃街舞大賽), wanting to make the summer memorable before they start a new chapter in life at different colleges.
“If you want something explosive and loaded with energy, you need to look no further than the summer between high school and college. Those kids have been held back and locked in for the [college entrance] examination. Once the exam is out of the way, they just go out and totally explode during that summer,” Su explained.
The movie harvests this lively, fast-paced energy with brisk editing, a catchy score and moments filled with dramatic tension. Having gained experience in documentary-making by working on My Football Summer (奇蹟的夏天, 2006), a slick, narrative-driven production about a football team by veteran documentary director Yang Li-chou (楊力州) and young filmmaker Chang Rong-ji (張榮吉), Su’s grad school classmate, the young director is no stranger to drama that offers plenty of twists and turns in the narrative. The film interweaves the stories of Alun and Undergradu-Eight to create an absorbing contrast between the playfulness and youthful buoyancy of the teen dancers and Alun’s struggles as an artist who is past his prime and faces an uncertain future.
Audiences are quickly drawn into the protagonists’ lives, anxiously waiting for the winner of the Metro Street Dance Competition to be announced or feeling relieved when Alun receives a call from Shanghai offering him a street dance-related job opportunity after he decides to become a real estate salesman.
It is not surprising that director Su becomes close to the dancers he has filmed, and their friendship is eloquently channeled and reflected in a film that has an intimate, right-on-the-spot feel. The production mostly involves Su carrying his digital camera to shoot all over Taipei and even in Paris. For important shoots, the director would give a 15-minute crash course on recording equipment to a friend and make a live sound engineer out of him or her for the day.
Other film professionals helped too, charging ridiculously low fees because they live up to the hip-hop spirit, said Su, to whom the term hip hop is synonymous with a passionate and an uncompromising can-do spirit.
“Those who have helped out [with the movie] were never low-fi. They are all super high-class,” Su said.
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