The second program in the National Theater Concert Hall’s 2012 Dancing into Autumn series has been long awaited since it marks the return of Taiwan’s dance world enfant terrible to the stage after an absence of almost two years.
Huang Yi (黃翊) wowed audiences in March 2008 with Body, Sound (身音), which he choreographed for Cloud Gate 2 while he was still a student at Taipei National University of the Arts, with its mix of eye-popping costumes and dancers creating their own score as they moved. He kept wowing them with pieces for that troupe, like TA-TA for Now and Violin — Symphony Project I (機械提琴—交響樂計畫之一), which featured computer-played violins.
There was also the work Huang did in his own name, such as Spin series. The 50-minute Spin 2010, Huang’s last work before he took a hiatus to do his military service, built on pieces he had been doing since 2006, works that combined his love of dance and his love of technology (a video camera, for example, or a crane arm).
Photo Courtesy of NTCH
Now he’s back, but with a show that has been stripped down to the basics, just two performers (including himself), and a musician.
Opening tonight at Taipei’s Experimental Theater, Double Yellow Lines (雙黃線) sees Huang teaming up with dancer Hu Chien (胡鑑) and French-Vietnamese composer An Ton That (孫仕安), also known as Anken. The 60-minute piece could be labeled “Huang Yi, unplugged” and it promises to be something special.
Huang has known Hu and An for several years.
He met Hu at graduate school at TNUA and they have worked together on various projects for about five years.
“I found his movement quality unique; he has very natural movement feeling that is really different from my physical feeling; so I decided to keep working with him,” Huang said in an e-mail interview.
He said he began working on the show in April and said he took inspiration from his daily life.
“To me, Double Yellow Lines is not just dance. It’s a record of my life. I tried to put some personal stories or feelings into this series, it’s really different from other types. For me it’s like a treasure. Most of the time I don’t have the opportunity to do that,” Huang said.
Double Yellow Lines marks a departure for Huang, and not just because he has put all his high-tech toys to one side.
“It’s my first time to collaborate with someone. I still choreographed most of the sections, but I started to listen to my collaborators [Hu and An], [and] changed most of my original ideas because the collaborators. I think it’s a good start, they pushed me to discover more possibilities of performing and music,” he said.
Huang has worked with An before — they did Symphony Project and Second Skin — but the music was always pre-recorded for those shows.
“This time I am trying to go back to the traditional way of ‘live music and dance,’ like an unplugged concert. Now I know it’s not an easy way, I learned so much this time, and it has given me many ideas for my future works,” he said.
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