Taiwanese choreographer Huang Yi (黃翊) and his industrial robot “Kuka” debuted in Japan on Sunday with a human-machine dance performance, as part of the “We Taiwan” exhibition at the Kansai Expo in Osaka.
The performance, which was part of a government-sponsored program to showcase Taiwanese cultural output, featured Huang dancing in sync with Kuka. They have toured 47 cities since 2012.
This was the first time the show had been staged in Japan, and a Japanese-language version of the audio description was recorded by a local voice actor.
Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Culture
The team previously produced an English-language version for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in the US.
Speaking at a post-show talk, Huang said that incorporating an audio description was a way to “expand the possibilities for artistic participation.”
“If art can help more people get closer to it, and allow visually impaired people to participate through audio description, then that is one way art, which is often seen as useless, can actually help people,” he said.
Performing in Japan felt like “a dream come true,” Huang said, adding that the idea of dancing with a robot came from the Japanese manga Doraemon.
He also showed the audience a childhood drawing of Doraemon that had been kept by his father.
“Although my life was difficult when I was young, Doraemon made me believe that technology could change one’s destiny,” Huang said, adding that the character’s use of gadgets to help others influenced the way he created performances involving interaction with machines.
After working with Kuka for more than a decade, it feels “a little like I have transferred part of my soul” into the robot, Huang said.
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS