The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) has embarked on tours across China and Europe, performing three shows in 10 cities to wrap up its 50th-anniversary year, the troupe said in a statement on Thursday last week.
The overseas tours began after the premiere run of Cloud Gate artistic director Cheng Tsung-lung’s (鄭宗龍) new artificial intelligence (AI)-infused piece Waves (波), which ended in Kaohsiung on Nov. 5, the troupe said.
A group of 13 dancers arrived in Shanghai on Tuesday last week, preparing for the first three shows of Cheng’s work Send in a Cloud (霞), which debuted in the city on Friday last week at the Shanghai International Dance Center, the statement said.
Photo courtesy of Cloud Gate Culture and Arts Foundation
It is Cheng’s first China tour after he took over the artistic director post from Cloud Gate founder Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) in 2020, and the statement said the “colorful piece that brings strong visual impact” is unlike any of its past works.
After performing at the 22nd China Shanghai International Arts Festival, Cloud Gate is to perform in Nanjing tomorrow and on Saturday and in Guangzhou on Friday and Saturday next week before the final four shows in China are held from Dec. 7 to 10 at China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing during the NCPA Dance Festival, the troupe said.
Meanwhile, another group of 13 Cloud Gate dancers departed for Europe on Sunday to perform 13 Tongues (十三聲) at Mercat de les Flors in Barcelona, Spain, from today to Sunday, it said.
Cloud Gate dancers then would travel to Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London and perform Cheng’s 2019 piece Lunar Halo (毛月亮), which is inspired by his observation of the phenomenon of a ring of light around the moon in Iceland, from Thursday next week to Sunday, it said.
The performance is also to feature the original soundtrack 22° Lunar Halo (毛月亮22°), first released in 2019 and written specifically for the show by the Icelandic Band Sigur Ros.
“In their own country, they [Cloud Gate] are much more than a dance company,” Sadler’s Wells Theatre artistic director and co-chief executive Alistair Spalding told the Financial Times while the troupe was performing 13 Tongues at the London venue in February 2020, just as COVID-19 was beginning to spread worldwide.
Cloud Gate dancers are to perform 13 Tongues at Teatros del Canal in Madrid on Dec. 6 and 7, and then perform it for the 100th time during the Festival de Danse Cannes in France, it said.
Didier Deschamps, artistic director of the French dance festival said he is looking forward to seeing Cloud Gate’s 13 Tongues being performed in Cannes and for the audience to experience the strong yet subtle emotions of the 2016 piece that is inspired by Cheng’s childhood memories of the bustling streets and religious rituals in Bangka (艋舺, also known as Monga), a part of the old town in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), the statement said.
Cloud Gate would also stage Lunar Halo at the Theater im Pfalzbau in Ludwigshafen, Germany, on Dec. 15 and 16 and 13 Tongues at the Auditorio de Tenerife Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain on Dec. 20 and 21 to conclude the tour, the troupe said.
The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre began this year’s celebrations by staging Lin’s 1978 classic Legacy in a six-city tour in Taiwan from April to June, followed by its annual free open-air 13 Tongues shows in July, which attracted about 20,000 people in Taipei alone, it said.
Cheng worked with Japanese new media artist Daito Manabe, who used generative AI to create the music and images for Waves, which helped spark ideas for the choreography of the piece which premiered in Taipei on Oct. 12.
Taiwan yesterday condemned the recent increase in Chinese coast guard-escorted fishing vessels operating illegally in waters around the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) in the South China Sea. Unusually large groupings of Chinese fishing vessels began to appear around the islands on Feb. 15, when at least six motherships and 29 smaller boats were sighted, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said in a news release. While CGA vessels were dispatched to expel the Chinese boats, Chinese coast guard ships trespassed into Taiwan’s restricted waters and unsuccessfully attempted to interfere, the CGA said. Due to the provocation, the CGA initiated an operation to increase
A crowd of over 200 people gathered outside the Taipei District Court as two sisters indicted for abusing a 1-year-old boy to death attended a preliminary hearing in the case yesterday afternoon. The crowd held up signs and chanted slogans calling for aggravated penalties in child abuse cases and asking for no bail and “capital punishment.” They also held white flowers in memory of the boy, nicknamed Kai Kai (剴剴), who was allegedly tortured to death by the sisters in December 2023. The boy died four months after being placed in full-time foster care with the
A Taiwanese woman on Sunday was injured by a small piece of masonry that fell from the dome of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican during a visit to the church. The tourist, identified as Hsu Yun-chen (許芸禎), was struck on the forehead while she and her tour group were near Michelangelo’s sculpture Pieta. Hsu was rushed to a hospital, the group’s guide to the church, Fu Jing, said yesterday. Hsu was found not to have serious injuries and was able to continue her tour as scheduled, Fu added. Mathew Lee (李世明), Taiwan’s recently retired ambassador to the Holy See, said he met
The Shanlan Express (山嵐號), or “Mountain Mist Express,” is scheduled to launch on April 19 as part of the centennial celebration of the inauguration of the Taitung Line. The tourism express train was renovated from the Taiwan Railway Corp’s EMU500 commuter trains. It has four carriages and a seating capacity of 60 passengers. Lion Travel is arranging railway tours for the express service. Several news outlets were invited to experience the pilot tour on the new express train service, which is to operate between Hualien Railway Station and Chihshang (池上) Railway Station in Taitung County. It would also be the first tourism service
RSS