This year’s Kuandu Arts Festival, the annual October celebration of the performing arts hosted by the Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), officially opens on Saturday with the promise of something for everyone.
The theme of this year’s festival is “Voyage,” an apt title for an event that is bringing artists from far and near, including university students, staff and alumni, and expanding past the boundaries of the campus in Taipei’s Guandu District. (關渡).
The school says the idea of “Voyage” is that art is just like any journey: “full of surprises and boundless creativity.”
Courtesy of the Paul Taylor Dance Company
Despite the “official” nature of Saturday’s events, the festival programming actually gets underway tonight with the first of three shows of Hakanai by the French digital arts company Adrien M & Claire B, in the school’s Experimental Theater.
Hakanai sees a solo dancer interacting with digital images, some of which in turn are reacting to sound patterns that they follow, to create a visual reality.
Tomorrow, the theater troupe Short One Player (三缺一劇團) will present Earth Project (土地計劃-首部曲) in the Dance Theater, while Saturday brings the opening of the Kuandu Light Art Festival and Light Forest, an interactive new media show, and Art Voyage by the school’s own Brainstorm Workshop.
Photo courtesy of Romain Etienne
PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY
Theatrical offerings include productions from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan, while the dance performances include B.OOM, a show by Taiwanese choreographer Benson Tsai (蔡博丞), who invited four foreign choreographers he met at various international festivals to showcase some of their prize-winning pieces, and — in a major coup for the school — two performances by the Paul Taylor Dance Company.
The Taylor company was last in Taipei in October 2008, when it was the sole troupe invited for that year’s Novel Hall’s Dance Series. It is coming back to Taipei as part of an Asian tour that will also take it to Bangkok and six cities in China.
Photo courtesy of Lin Shou-cheng
The troupe will perform two different programs under the collective title of “Masterworks.” It is truth in advertising as the six dances are exactly that.
Three of the works were seen in the Novel Hall shows: Le Sacre du Printemps (the rehearsal) and Arden Court both premiered in 1981 and Promethean Fire from 2002. The other pieces will probably be new to Taipei dance audiences.
Tickets for the two shows, on the weekend of Oct. 22 and Oct. 23, have being going fast.
MUSIC, EXHIBITIONS, FILM FEST
On the music side, there will be concerts by Korean-American violinist Benny Kim; Insomnia by the US-based ensemble Cuarteto Tanguero, which focuses on traditional and contemporary tango music; the TNUA String Ensemble and Chorus as well as the TNUA Orchestra.
In addition to all the shows, there will be exhibitions at the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere around the campus, lectures, a film festival, an animation festival and art parades.
More information about the Kuandu Arts Festival events and programs can be found on the school’s Web site in Chinese and English: kdaf.tnua.edu.tw/2016/.
The university is easily accessible by MRT and buses. Take the MRT to Guandu Station, where regularly scheduled shuttle buses run up to the school or, exiting from the back of the station, the school is about a 15 to 20 minute walk, depending on how fast you make it up the hill to the campus.
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