Dancer/choreographer Sun Chuo-tai (孫梲泰) decided to call his company 8213 Physical Dance Theater (8213肢體舞蹈劇場) because he wanted the name to convey the idea that the company and its productions would be about more than “just dance.”
He wanted to break the mold, blur the boundaries between the dancers and the audience, between dance and theater, between movement and text — as well as examine the connections between them.
Connections, or rather the growing lack of them, are a common theme in Sun’s work. He examines them once again in the company’s newest production, Electron (電子), which began a four-day run at the Guling Street Theater (牯嶺街小劇場) last night.
“Electron ... We wanted to bring down the size of electricity, wanted to give a feeling to the topic, so we chose loneliness,” Sun said on Monday during an interview at the theater. “In society we have a lot of gadgets now, we don’t need to talk to one another. We’re a little more removed today.”
He said he wanted to examine what the proliferation of technology in our everyday life is doing to us.
“Last year my house lost electricity for one week. I thought ‘Oh, my God,’ it’s not convenient. Just to do your normal life — if you want to go to the bathroom, there is no light. I’m also a businessman; I need a cellphone, a laptop, a lot of electronics,” Sun said. “If you forget your cellphone, you panic. These things control your life.”
“We use these things to create a distance. We are connected but you don’t need to see one another. There are ‘no feelings,’ people even break-up by electronic devices. So finally we are at a great distance [from each other]. You close yourself off or use iPods to disconnect,” he said.
The company has been rehearsing the piece for four months, although the project has been in the works for a year. It’s a smaller production than last year’s Boundless: My Bliss (無國界—我的天堂), featuring just Sun, dancer/choreographer Casey Avaunt and an old classmate and colleague of Sun’s from National Taiwan University of the Arts and Taipei Dance Forum, who now goes by the name of Yogi (Chan Tien-chen, 詹天甄).
While Sun said the smaller number of dancers was both a budgetary and a creative decision, it did allow him to add a musician, Chen Shih-hsing (陳世興), for both the rehearsals and the performances.
Sun and Avaunt collaborated on the choreography. A big part of the process, they said, was working out the “why” of each movement.
To reflect electricity, the movements have a lot of vibration and sharp moves, they said, adding that they had to create the basic movements and then find a way to explain to themselves and others “why we are doing this movement.”
“The idea was clear in the beginning, the rehearsals just worked it out,” Avaunt said, though Sun was quick to add that the “working out” meant a lot of negotiating.
Dec. 16 to Dec. 22 Growing up in the 1930s, Huang Lin Yu-feng (黃林玉鳳) often used the “fragrance machine” at Ximen Market (西門市場) so that she could go shopping while smelling nice. The contraption, about the size of a photo booth, sprayed perfume for a coin or two and was one of the trendy bazaar’s cutting-edge features. Known today as the Red House (西門紅樓), the market also boasted the coldest fridges, and offered delivery service late into the night during peak summer hours. The most fashionable goods from Japan, Europe and the US were found here, and it buzzed with activity
US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, speaking at the Reagan Defense Forum last week, said the US is confident it can defeat the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the Pacific, though its advantage is shrinking. Paparo warned that the PRC might launch a “war of necessity” even if it thinks it could not win, a wise observation. As I write, the PRC is carrying out naval and air exercises off its coast that are aimed at Taiwan and other nations threatened by PRC expansionism. A local defense official said that China’s military activity on Monday formed two “walls” east
The latest military exercises conducted by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) last week did not follow the standard Chinese Communist Party (CCP) formula. The US and Taiwan also had different explanations for the war games. Previously the CCP would plan out their large-scale military exercises and wait for an opportunity to dupe the gullible into pinning the blame on someone else for “provoking” Beijing, the most famous being former house speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022. Those military exercises could not possibly have been organized in the short lead time that it was known she was coming.
The world has been getting hotter for decades but a sudden and extraordinary surge in heat has sent the climate deeper into uncharted territory — and scientists are still trying to figure out why. Over the past two years, temperature records have been repeatedly shattered by a streak so persistent and puzzling it has tested the best-available scientific predictions about how the climate functions. Scientists are unanimous that burning fossil fuels has largely driven long-term global warming, and that natural climate variability can also influence temperatures one year to the next. But they are still debating what might have contributed to this
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