Choreographer Jade Hua’s (華碧玉) productions last year — Vipashayana (觀。自在) and Crystal Tun-Hwang (水晶瓶中的敦煌) — focused respectively on the search for meaning in modern society and the path to self-discovery with a nod to Buddhist cave murals in China’s Gansu Province. Those shows encapsulated Hua’s ambition to combine modern and traditional Chinese dance techniques, while training the members of her 13-year-old company, Jade & Artists Dance Troupe (肢體音符舞團) to dance “from the inside out.”
The company’s latest production, An Untold Secret (藏心), which premieres tonight at Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall, once again has the company shining a spotlight on the internal life of humans, only this time it is the search for, and the meaning of, love.
Working with choreographer Hsu Wei-ling (許瑋玲), stage designer Choo Yean Wong (黃祖延) and composer and singer Kevin Lin (林隆璇), Hua has crafted a production that refined both her dancers and her production team.
Some of the challenges she faced came from trying to create the right atmosphere for a production about love (luckily Zhongshan Hall has a balcony, as balcony scenes figure so often in love stories) and the search for images to project onto the two backdrops. Another test came from the need for the dancers to act as well as dance.
Lin, as well as being the music producer, plays the central character. He had to walk a tightrope in creating a score that balances classical music with pop songs while working on his own performance, since he will be playing the piano and singing. The process was made easier, however, by the fact that he is an old friend of Hua’s and had worked with the company on Crystal Tun-Hwang.
An Untold Secret is divided into three parts — Paradise Lost, Night and Day and Hidden Heart — plus a prelude.
Paradise Lost is about young love, while Night and Day examines love’s fickle nature, and Hidden Heart expands the search for love to a wider scale — the search for true happiness.
In her director’s notes, Hua said An Untold Secret is about seeing all sides of love — the good, the bad and the ugly — as well as life and death.
As the secrets hidden inside each of the characters — or ourselves — are disclosed, Hua said, they remind us that we should feel grateful for what we’ve experienced.
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