Meimage Dance Company (玫舞擊) knows how to pick winners. The four young Taiwanese dancer/choreographers that were invited to take part in this year’s New Choreographer Project amply demonstrated both their talent and their potential on Saturday at Eslite Xinyi’s performance hall.
The two men, Ye Bo-sheng (葉博聖) and Chang Chien-ming (張建明), presented pieces that explored the boundaries of insanity, while Chang Lan-yun (張藍勻) and Lee Chen-wei’s (李貞葳) work were all about control.
Ye, who dances with Landestheater Coburg Ballet, began the show by pushing four long rectangular tables that served as his prop diagonally across the stage. His dance appeared to be about coming apart at the seams, where bouts of expansiveness were mixed with convulsive elements, as he occasionally pulled long (invisible) strings from his fingers, head and other parts of the body.
Photo courtesy of Meimage Dance Company
I found his piece, Xianyi (弦移, Chord Changes), difficult to watch — not because of his dancing, but because the harsh, dissonant score was excruciating to listen to. If I had been rehearsing to that soundtrack for weeks, I’d be acting crazy too.
BODY CONTROL
While Ye’s piece was all about losing it, Chang Lan-yun’s Hands was all about tight control of the body, with her taut limbs stretching out to the furthest points possible. It was an apt title because for the first half of the piece she danced with her right hand closely clasping other parts of her body.
Photo courtesy of Meimage Dance Company
In one repeated motif, she would plant her legs knock kneed, feet rolling inward, as her upper body arched and curved with supple grace.
Clad in shorts, a T-shirt and sweater at the beginning of the piece, when she clicked a small light on and off several times, she first shed the sweater and later the shorts and shirt until in the end she was moving about a darkened space in just nude-toned bra and briefs, moving over and around the light block like an elegant, supple arachnid (albeit with just four limbs).
Lee also focused on control in Black Box (黑盒子), but in this case it was control over the audience, which she had eating out of her hands within minutes of entering the performance space, clutching a large music box, stool and two pillows to her chest.
Photo courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
She walked around, examining the audience, before selecting several to act as helpers. One man in a front row seat was given the music box and instructed — through sign language — to play it. As she picked her other helpers, she unpinned the skirt of her dress, which had been folded up to create pockets from which she took a pair of squirt guns, a pair of scissors and a flashlight, while a spool of green string was pulled out of her bra and stretched out across the floor. Everything was done silently — though accented by fierce looks, especially to the music man when his handle-cranking began failing.
Lee’s dancing was infused with an energy and recklessness that can be attributed to her five years working with Ohad Naharin, first with the Batsheva Ensemble and then the Batsheva Dance Company. She was thrilling to watch as she spun about the stage, while the flashlight holder tried to keep pace and capture her face with the mini spotlight.
The green string came into play when she wound it up around her wrists, handcuff style, and moved over to perch on the stool, whereupon it was time for the two squirt-gun holders to go into action — reluctantly at first and then with delight — shooting at her with red and green water as she twisted and turn and showed where she wanted to be hit: the chest, a leg, her rear end, her face.
Finally the scissors holder was called up to clip the string binding her wrists, releasing both Lee and waves of applause from the audience.
PAINT IT BLACK
Lee’s was a hard act to follow, but Chang Chien-ming did so with his work, The Fools (愚人), an embrace and a celebration of inner lunacy. Clad in a ragged black ensemble with a large ruffled white collar, Chang Chien-ming began by painting — smearing, really — his face with black and while greasepaint.
The soundtrack was a mix of Chang Chien-ming’s own monologues with classical bits and David Bowie’s thumping Let’s Dance, which provided a background of lows and highs as he danced around, under and inside a black and red net creation by Aephie Huimi (陳繪彌) that hung from the ceiling. He gave a mesmerizing performance of a man tottering on the brink, or perhaps even already lost on the other side.
The two performances of the 2014 New Choreographer Project today in Greater Kaohsiung had sold out by Sunday, apparently after word of mouth spread following the Taipei shows.
Following the young choreographers, it was time for a master to demonstrate why she has such a devoted following.
The Legend Lin Dance Theatre (無垢舞蹈劇場) took over the Experimental Theater last weekend for a show that was billed as an Intimate Encounter (觸身‧實境). Basically, it was a preview of coming attractions.
The troupe showed the lengthy preparations the two main dancers in Song of Pensive Beholding (Chants de la Destinee, 觀), undergo before each performance. The company will be restaging the show at the National Theater, where it premiered in December 2009, for three performances starting on Sept. 19.
Artistic director and choreographer Lin Lee-chen’s (林麗珍) works create worlds of mysticism, beauty and mediation, where time moves at a snail’s pace, but with brief explosions of intense energy. Beautiful costumes by Academy Award-winner Tim Yip (葉錦添) are like icing on the cake.
Song of Pensive Beholding tells of a race of eagles, led by two brothers. United in protecting their land and their people, they fall out when one of the brothers falls in love with a mysterious creature, the White Bird.
It took almost two hours for the two dancers — Wu Ming-jing (吳明璟) and Cheng Chieh-wen (鄭傑文) — to be body-painted, coiffed and costumed by three helpers, yet watching the bodypaint dry proved captivating enough that the audience members barely moved more than the performers did, only beginning to rustle a bit at the hour-and-a-half mark. It was like being invited inside a secret world to behold the inner workings of a sacred ritual.
I was already looking forward to seeing Song of Pensive Beholding, but Saturday night dress rehearsal made me almost giddy with anticipation.
Tickets have been selling fast for the three shows, with the top-tier seats already sold out. The rest will probably go before the end of the month.
This story has been amended since it was first published to correct dancers' names.
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