The Royal Ballet won a whole new legion of fans with its visit to the National Theater, which more than lived up to the expectations that had been building since its visit was first announced in December.
The Mixed Bill program and Giselle were in both impressive productions, in very different ways, but in the end in came down to the dancers, who were simply superb. The decision to open the Taipei tour with the mix of Wayne McGregor’s Choma, Sir Frederick Ashton’s Raphsody and Chrisopher Wheeldon’s DVG was spot on: McGregor’s piece served notice that this was not your parents’ Royal Ballet, Ashton’s gave the audience a vision of what they think the Royal is, while Wheeldon’s showed what the Royal actually is now.
Chroma is set in a clinically sparse, yet glowing cube (by John Pawson), with tall walls and a large rectangular cutout in the back. The 10 dancers on Friday night — Lauren Cuthbertson, Yuhui Choe, Sarah Lamb, Melissa Hamilton, Ricardo Cervera, Paul Kay, Eric Underwood, Jonathan Watkins, Edward Watson and Dawid Trzensimiech — arched, contorted and distorted their bodies in ways that often looked completely inhuman and yet were oddly familiar. Often the pairings looked like the mating rituals of some elongated stick insect, especially in the lifts and carries, when the women would spread their legs wide, but with the feet angled in sharply. And yet there was a softness in some of the pas de deux. McGregor’s choreography built on the tensions and power of Joby Talbot’s arrangements of White Stripe songs.
Photo: Diane Baker, Taipei times
Steven McRae shone in Rhapsody, which is really all about the male danseur, since his partner — the exquisite Alina Cojocaru — doesn’t enter until about halfway through. Set to Serge Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the piece is filled with flashy moves for the male lead, but with plenty of fast footwork for the six-couple ensemble as well.
DVG is a 29-minute journey of pure bliss. Everything about it was perfect: the soaring, pulsating score by Michael Nyman (his 1993 composition commemorating the inauguration of France’s TVG trains, MGV: Musique a Grade Vitesse), the masterful choreography that showed Wheeldon’s lineage — George Balanchine’s geometric pattern-making, the humanity and accessibility of Jerome Robbins and Ashton’s romance and lyricism — and the eight lead dancers: Laura Morera, Nathalie Harrison, Itziar Mendizabal, Cuthbertson, McRae, Ryoichi Hirano, Gary Avis and Nehemiah Kish. Each of the lead pairs has a distinctive look, while the 16-member ensemble — who begin packed together like commuter sardines — later expand to lines that arch and weave in rolling waves of motion.
When the company performs this work at home there is a massive silvery sculptural set piece, but DVG works just as well on a bare stage, thanks to the great lighting design by Jennifer Tipton. DVG is a jubilant piece that lingers in the mind long after the performance is over, just as the four female leads, carried by their partners, linger on stage, slowing spinning after the music has stopped.
The Saturday matinee of Giselle showed the purity of line and storytelling the Royal is famous for. I have never seen a Giselle in which the storytelling is so clear, from the mime in Act I to the moment in Act II when Giselle places herself, arms outstretched, in front of Albrecht, to protect him from the wrath of Myrtha and her Wilis, who throw their arms over their heads and curve away in terror.
Roberta Marquez was a delightful, but fragile Giselle to Thiago Soares’ Albrecht, while Thomas Whitehead as Hilarion was more a jealous stalker than lovesick youth. Also notable were Hikaru Kobayashi as Myrtha and Akane Takada and Kenta Kura, who were the lead couple in the Pas de six in Act I.
Now that the Royal has wrapped up its first visit to Taiwan, let’s hope it won’t take another centennial anniversary before the company is seen here again.
Has the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) changed under the leadership of Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌)? In tone and messaging, it obviously has, but this is largely driven by events over the past year. How much is surface noise, and how much is substance? How differently party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) would have handled these events is impossible to determine because the biggest event was Ko’s own arrest on multiple corruption charges and being jailed incommunicado. To understand the similarities and differences that may be evolving in the Huang era, we must first understand Ko’s TPP. ELECTORAL STRATEGY The party’s strategy under Ko was
It’s Aug. 8, Father’s Day in Taiwan. I asked a Chinese chatbot a simple question: “How is Father’s Day celebrated in Taiwan and China?” The answer was as ideological as it was unexpected. The AI said Taiwan is “a region” (地區) and “a province of China” (中國的省份). It then adopted the collective pronoun “we” to praise the holiday in the voice of the “Chinese government,” saying Father’s Day aligns with “core socialist values” of the “Chinese nation.” The chatbot was DeepSeek, the fastest growing app ever to reach 100 million users (in seven days!) and one of the world’s most advanced and
Before the recall election drowned out other news, CNN last month became the latest in a long line of media organs to report on abuses of migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing fleet. After a brief flare of interest, the news media moved on. The migrant worker issues, however, did not. CNN’s stinging title, “Taiwan is held up as a bastion of liberal values. But migrant workers report abuse, injury and death in its fishing industry,” was widely quoted, including by the Fisheries Agency in its response. It obviously hurt. The Fisheries Agency was not slow to convey a classic government
It turns out many Americans aren’t great at identifying which personal decisions contribute most to climate change. A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that when asked to rank actions, such as swapping a car that uses gasoline for an electric one, carpooling or reducing food waste, participants weren’t very accurate when assessing how much those actions contributed to climate change, which is caused mostly by the release of greenhouse gases that happen when fuels like gasoline, oil and coal are burned. “People over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon
RSS