Love is blooming, Taipei is blooming, the very air is alive with possibilities. Or so the 10-year-old Dance Body Company (體相舞蹈劇場) would have you think.
But they also want you to think about all the complications, not just of love, but the modern age, whether that is war or exhibitions of flowers.
The Blooming Age (花漾流年) — staged as part of the Shining Star Festival that began in mid-April — is the second crossover effort by the troupe, following last fall’s The Lost Part (天堂的缺口) at the Experimental Theater.
For Lost Part, the troupe joined forces with Taipei Symphony Orchestra flute player Yu Ya-hui (游雅慧) and Taiwanese opera performer Chien Yu-lin (簡玉琳). Yu is back for The Blooming Age and has brought a TSO colleague, violinist Roger Chiang (姜智譯), with her.
Moving to a bigger venue for this production — the Red House Theater (西門紅樓) in Ximending — gave the troupe more room to play around, as well as providing another source of inspiration for company founder and choreographer Lee Ming-cheng (李名正).
The history of the theater and its atmosphere makes it very easy to conjure up a variety of feelings, he said in a telephone interview earlier this week. The theater has a kind of “lost in time” or “timelessness” quality, he said.
The multimedia, multi-technology program runs 90 minutes, with intermission, and is divided up into three dances, segmented into decades yet connected by a common thread.
Starting from the differing attitudes to love held by men and women, Lee uses the changing code of conduct for love and sexual relations in the modern era as a metaphor for the relationship between business and state, between governments and even manages to draw a connection to the international flower expo that Taipei will be hosting starting in November.
“The expo is coming up and there are going to be so many flowers in the city, they have really opened things up,” he said, “opening up the mind as well to new ideas.”
The interaction of relationships is explored — the body language between a man and a woman, or a man and man, or a woman and women — whether as conversations between lovers, friends, colleagues, bystanders — whether friendly or war-like. How do you sit, how do you stand, how do you fight, how do you say you’re sorry, how do you move in a post-war survival game — all of these were ideas that Lee explored, in what the production notes call “Body Challenge 2010.”
It will be challenging indeed for a seven-dancer company to pull off, but Lee is confident that his team is up to the task.
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