The Kaohsiung City Ballet (KCB, 高雄城市芭蕾舞團) has produced some of its most challenging works in recent years for the Kaohsiung Spring Art Festival since its inception five years ago.
Its ballets have been inspired by tales from both Taiwan and the West, including Peter and the Wolf (彼得與狼) in 2010 and the Third Prince — Rebels Na-Zha (三太子–哪吒) in 2012. And they’ve been designed to appeal to children as well as adults.
For this year’s festival, company founder Chang Hsiu-ru (張秀如) decided to restage Coppelia (柯碧莉亞), a 19th-century romantic ballet that is filled with humor and has a happy ending instead of the usual doomed love and tragedy of Giselle or Swan Lake.
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung City Ballet
The ballet is based on an 1815 story by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann and was originally choreographed for the Paris Opera by Arthur Saint-Leon in 1870 to a score by French composer Leo Delibes.
In a nutshell, Coppelia tells the story of a mechanical doll built by Doctor Coppelius, which is so life-like that a young man falls in love with her, much to the dismay of his fiance. Jealousy makes the young couple behave badly toward each other and toward the doctor, with pranks and hidden identities, before everything is sorted out and the village can celebrate a wedding.
To restage the ballet Chang recruited freelance Romanian dancer, choreographer and video artist Constantin Georgescu, who spent several weeks rehearsing with the company.
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung City Ballet
Having seen Dialogue (對話), a humorous work that Georgescu co-choreographed with Germany-based Taiwanese dancer Yuan Shang-jen (袁尚仁) last year in Taipei — which was a huge hit in the Collecting Button show produced by Meimage Dance (玫舞擊) — I am looking forward to seeing what he has done with such a classic European tale.
Photo courtesy of Kaohsiung City Ballet
War in the Taiwan Strait is currently a sexy topic, but it is not the only potential Chinese target. Taking the Russian Far East would alleviate or even solve a lot of China’s problems, including critical dependencies on fuel, key minerals, food, and most crucially, water. In a previous column (“Targeting Russian Asia,” Dec. 28, 2024, page 12) I noted that having following this topic for years, I consistently came to this conclusion: “It would simply be easier to buy what they need from the Russians, who also are nuclear-armed and useful partners in helping destabilize the American-led world order.
Last Thursday, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) detected 41 sorties of Chinese aircraft and nine navy vessels around Taiwan over a 24-hour period. “Thirty out of 41 sorties crossed the median line and entered Taiwan’s northern, central, southwestern and eastern ADIZ (air defense identification zones),” it reported. Local media noted that the exercises coincided with the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taiwan. During the visit of then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in August 2022, the largest number of sorties was on Aug. 5, “involving a total of 47 fighter aircraft and two supporting reconnaissance/patrol aircraft.
July 7 to July 13 Even though the Japanese colonizers declared Taiwan “pacified” on Nov. 18, 1895, unrest was still brewing in Pingtung County. The Japanese had completed their march of conquest down the west coast of Taiwan, stamping out local resistance. But in their haste to conquer the Republic of Formosa’s last stronghold of Tainan, they largely ignored the highly-militarized Liudui (六堆, six garrisons) Hakka living by the foothills in Kaohsiung and Pingtung. They were organized as their name suggested, and commanders such as Chiu Feng-hsiang (邱鳳祥) and Chung Fa-chun (鍾發春) still wanted to fight. Clashes broke out in today’s
Xu Pengcheng looks over his shoulder and, after confirming the coast is clear, helps his crew of urban adventurers climb through the broken window of an abandoned building. Long popular in the West, urban exploration, or “urbex” for short, sees city-dwelling thrill-seekers explore dilapidated, closed-off buildings and areas — often skirting the law in the process. And it is growing in popularity in China, where a years-long property sector crisis has left many cities dotted with empty buildings. Xu, a 29-year-old tech worker from the eastern city of Qingdao, has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers for his photos of rundown schools and
RSS