Wang Hao-yeh’s (王顥燁) fledgling theater group, W.H.Y. Wilders Studio (好野工作室), was first seen at the 2013 Taipei Fringe Festival with La Casa (再見家). It has produced a play a year since then, gradually building a reputation for small, reflective works.
Next week it takes over the first floor black box that is the Guling Street Avant-garde Theatre’s Experimental Theater for a production of German director/playwright Falk Richter’s play Nothing Hurts (無感傷痛).
Richter is one of what has become known as the “Hamburg School” of young actors and directors who graduated from Hamburg University in 1985. His works center on society’s obsession with the media and the media’s influence on human psychology and relationships. In recent years, some of these productions have been colloborative efforts that blend theater and dance.
Photo courtesy of Sherry Huang
Taipei audiences had a chance to see one such work in November last year when the National Theater presented Australian dance troupe Chunky Move’s 2014 production Complexity of Belonging, created by Richter and Dutch choreographer Anouk van Dijk, the troupe’s artistic director.
The smaller-scale Nothing Hurts, which premiered in Germany in 1999, was one of Richter’s first collaborations with Van Dijk.
It is a story of two young women, their solitude and communication failures. Wang thinks it is about how people desire to get closer to one another, but find it difficult to “become one.”
Photo courtesy of Sherry Huang
She came across the play in a recently published Chinese translation of a collection of German plays and was attracted by its themes of failed connections and failed communication, which have been key topics in her own productions, as well as the possibility of movement in the text.
It is not the first time that Wang has integrated choreography into a play, having experimented with it in last year’s The Confession (99封告白信), but this time she wanted to find a way for the performers to dance and speak at the same time.
Wang is a proponent of “Total Theater,” which combines acting, music and images.
She tapped choreographer Su Ping-wen (蘇品文) for the production team along with sound designer Lin Ge-wei (林格維), stage designer Dolcevita Zheng (袁浩程) and costume designer Juby Chiu (邱娉勻).
The four performers are Tseng Hsin-yen (曾歆雁), who played Brunnhilde in Dark Eyes Performance Lab’s (黑眼睛跨劇團) 2014 production of Die Walkure (The Valkyrie, 女武神); dancer Cheng Ya-wei (張雅為); Lee You-wei (李祐緯) and Huang Yu-ming (黃裕閔).
The play, which opens on Thursday next week for a five-show run, will be performed in Mandarin, with English subtitles.
This story has been amended since it was first published to correct the English title of the play "The Confession" (99封告白信).
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