Horse (驫舞劇場), Taiwan’s one-time all-male dance ensemble, has gradually been adding women to its casts. However, for the company’s latest production, Duets (兩對), which opens tonight at Taipei’s Experimental Theater, cofounder and artistic director Chen Wu-kang (陳武康) decided on an entirely new approach.
“It was very convenient for us to decide to do two duets,” the 37-year-old Chen said in a telephone interview on Monday night. “There are two married couples in the company.”
However, the dancing ideals of both couples are different, he said, referring to himself and his 32-year-old wife, Yeh Ming-hwa (葉名樺) — who just finished her own production, Nordic at Taipei’s Songshan Cultural and Creative Park last weekend — and their collaborators, Liu Kuan-hsiang (劉冠詳) and his wife, Chien Ching-ying (簡晶瀅), who are both 27.
Photo courtesy of Horse
“So we each did our own duet, then came together,” Chen said, adding that they have extended the separate, then combined format into the actual performances.
Tonight and tomorrow each pair will dance their own duet, with an intermission separating the two pieces. However, Saturday and Sunday’s shows will see the two couples sharing the stage, performing their duets in parallel.
“We just have to work out some of the traffic details,” he said, adding, “as usual, we like a challenge.”
Photo courtesy of Horse
Throwing in a reference to the late US comedian George Carlin’s riff on people working so hard on their self-confidence that they could no longer work in groups or together, Chen said a duet is the smallest group form to work with.
“With three people, you get politics,” he said.
“Ming and I have known each other for 21 years, but never really danced together,” he said. “In the beginning, I thought it [their duet] would be about our relationship, but it’s not… So we came up with three sections, each related to another section, either a pair or opposite.”
Liu’s piece is about an even more intense, and fraught, relationship, he said.
“It is about the experience of taking care of his mother in a hospice over the past eight months, washing his mother’s vagina day after day,” Chen said.
Taiwan-based French sound artist Yannick Dauby, who is artist-in-residence with Horse, has provided the score for both duets.
Liu’s piece uses a lot of his own voice, enhanced by Dauby, Chen said, while for his and Yeh’s duet, “we kind of jammed together, we have a base and are kind of improvising on that.”
Crop damage from Typhoon Danas “had covered 9,822 hectares of farmland, more than 1.5 percent of Taiwan’s arable land, with an average loss rate of 30 percent, equivalent to 2,977 hectares of total crop failure,” this paper reported on Thursday last week. Costs were expected to exceed NT$1 billion. The disaster triggered clashes in the legislature last week between members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and China-aligned lawmakers from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). DPP caucus chief executive Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) argued that opposition lawmakers should take responsibility for slashing the Ministry of Agriculture’s (MOA)
Asked to define sex, most people will say it means penetration and anything else is just “foreplay,” says Kate Moyle, a psychosexual and relationship therapist, and author of The Science of Sex. “This pedestals intercourse as ‘real sex’ and other sexual acts as something done before penetration rather than as deserving credit in their own right,” she says. Lesbian, bisexual and gay people tend to have a broader definition. Sex education historically revolved around reproduction (therefore penetration), which is just one of hundreds of reasons people have sex. If you think of penetration as the sex you “should” be having, you might
When life gives you trees, make paper. That was one of the first thoughts to cross my mind as I explored what’s now called Chung Hsing Cultural and Creative Park (中興文化創意園區, CHCCP) in Yilan County’s Wujie Township (五結). Northeast Taiwan boasts an abundance of forest resources. Yilan County is home to both Taipingshan National Forest Recreation Area (太平山國家森林遊樂區) — by far the largest reserve of its kind in the country — and Makauy Ecological Park (馬告生態園區, see “Towering trees and a tranquil lake” in the May 13, 2022 edition of this newspaper). So it was inevitable that industrial-scale paper making would
As the world has raced to understand how Taiwan can be both the world’s most important producer of semiconductors while also the pin in the grenade of World War III, a reasonable shelf of “Taiwan books” has been published in the last few years. Most describe Taiwan according to a power triangle dominated by the US and China. But what of the actual Taiwanese themselves? Who are they? And should they have any say in the matter? Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival is perhaps the first general history of Taiwan to answer
RSS