Choreographer Chang Ting-ting (張婷婷) is capping off a very busy year with a Christmas gift to fans: her latest production for her company, T.T.C. Dance (張婷婷獨立製作), opens tomorrow night at Taipei’s Wellspring Theater.
It has been a very busy year for Chang and her dancers, with festival performances in Europe, the US and Asia, including a month-long residency in Malaysia.
Then last month she was one of the two winners of the Grand Award at the McCallum Theater Choreography Festival in Palm Desert, California, for her terrific Persistence of Memory (肢‧色系列2：時空抽屜), which premiered last year at the Experimental Theater in Taipei. She shared the award — and the US$10,000 prize — with Laura Karlin and the Invertigo Dance Theatre for their production of Mine.
Photo Courtesy of Chen Chang-chih
Chang’s new piece, Deja vu (既視感), like Persistence of Memory, features 3D technology, but she said it is rooted in the work she did in 2014 for In the Name of Poetry — A Blooming Tree (以詩之名：一棵開花的樹), which explored life’s interactions and the intersection of life and death.
She said the Deja vu was inspired by Emile Boirac’s 1867 work L’Aviner des Sciences Psychiques, which said that 70 percent of the world’s population would experience a feeling of deja vu at least once in their lives.
She has teamed up once again with Paris-based Taiwanese multimedia artist Lin Jin-yao (林經堯), who created the visuals for last year’s show.
Photo Courtesy of Chen Chang-chih
“Last year he kept talking about how well his visuals worked, changing with the changes in music, so he suggested doing the music for the new project as well,” she said in an interview on Sunday.
“Now he thinks it’s too much work for him,” she joked.
The combination is not quite as strange as it might sound, as Lin earned his bachelors of fine arts in music, but switched to multimedia in graduate school.
Photo Courtesy of Chen Chang-chih
Chang rounded out her production team by tapping lighting designer Goh Boon Ann (吳文安) and Huang Jinya (黃靖雅) as music director.
“I was very lucky, got lots of invites to festivals with the last piece [Persistence of Memory] and Jin-yao also traveled with us, so we had lots of chances to talk about the new show,” Chang said.
“I never felt that I had really finished A Blooming Tree, and I talked with him about the tree. Everyone has an experience of deja vu, so we also talk about consciousness and unconsciousness; that really interests me,” she said.
Chang said she also spent a lot of time talking with her seven dancers about the subject.
“Everyone has an experience or opinion, especially young people,” she said. “When I talked to the dancers they gave me a lot of material, lots of personal stories.”
Chang said the new work has been very challenging, artistically and technically.
“I have never done this kind of dance before,” she said.
“We have had a lot of talks about how to show if an image is the past, present of future, because Jin-yao didn’t want the multimedia to do it,” she said.
While Chang and her team have been working on the project for months, she said there was still a lot of work to be done this week, when they finally going into the Wellspring Theater, to tweak the lighting, projections and dancers’ moves.
While Deja vu, like Persistence of Memory, relies on 3D technology, the audience will not be wearing the red and blue paper glasses like the ones used last year, but those like movie theaters hand out.
“I think it will be a very fun piece. Very strong, condensed,” Chang said.
People will be surprised by the music, “it’s pretty heavy metal,” she said.
The show runs about 60 minutes, and ticketholders should get there on time as latecomers will not be admitted once the performance starts.
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