Chou Shu-yi (周書毅), like a lot of choreographers, is interested in exploring the development of movement and how to integrate movement with his environment, society and life, as well as the affect all these have on a creation.
He also really enjoys collaborations, with other dancers and choreographers, theater directors, musicians, videographers and many, many other artists, something that has been evident from the beginning of his career, when he was one of the founding members of the male dance collective that is now known as Horse (驫舞劇場).
After his 1875 Ravel & Bolero won the Sadler’s Wells Theatre “International Dance Competition Award” in 2009, and his Start With the Body won a Danish choreography competition the following year, he founded his own company, Chou Shu-yi and Dancers (周先生與舞者們) in 2011, which he envisioned as a team platform not only for his own works, but those of other young Taiwanese. The company sponsored the Next Choreography Project (下一個編舞計畫) for several years before Chou turned to other forms of collaboration.
Photo courtesy of Max Lee
Chou’s works have run the gamut from solo pieces, such as 2011’s Faceless (我／不要／臉), to the terrific Visible and Invisible (看得見的城市，看不見的人) in 2014 — a huge multi-dancer piece created for the National Theater — to dances for other companies and small collaborative installation projects for museums and other facilities, to video-centric pieces such as last year’s Drift In The Book and The Last Day of Your Book (有河書店的最後一天 ).
This weekend he is at the Polymer Art Space (空場藝術聚落) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投) with Break & Break! (無用之地), which combines an exhibition of Chou’s video works from his travels and a live performance.
Chou said the videos are ones that he has made over the past two to three years around Taiwan, including Taitung and other east coast towns, where he explored old factories and buildings slated for demolition because the government wants to repurpose the land, as well as trips to China and Mongolia.
Photo courtesy of Chou Shu-ii
He said he is interested in the link between habitat and humanity and his relationship with cities themselves. The pieces are meditations on the meaning of “break”: it could be just a pause or a rest, or it could mean complete destruction and awaiting rebirth, he said.
The videos will be projected onto the walls at Polymer.
He has been working on the project since December last year, with videographer Max Lee (李國漢), sound designer Wang Yu-jun (王榆鈞) and lighting designer Chuang Chih-heng (莊知恆).
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers
RSS