It’s been decades since the Universal Ballet of Korea last performed in Taipei, and it did so back then with a roster that was top-heavy with foreign guest stars, leaving the company’s own dancers largely in the shade.
What a difference the years have made. From its somewhat unorthodox beginnings (how many dance troupes are founded by a church?), the company has grown in size and stature, building a repertoire of Russian romantic ballets such as Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, La Bayadere and Don Quixote, as well as ballets based on Korean folktales, while nurturing talented dancers from South Korea and elsewhere in Asia (including several Taiwanese over the years).
The company will perform its iconic Shim Chung (沈清) at the National Theater in Taipei on April 5 and April 6, under the auspices of Taiwanese ballerina/teacher-turned-impresario Wang Tzer-shing’s (王澤馨) International Ballet Star Gala Group.
Photo Courtesy of Universal Ballet of Korea
Wang visited Universal Ballet and its school during a brief trip to Seoul at the beginning of this month to finalize details of the shows and said she returned to Taipei even more impressed with the company.
“I think that [South] Korean ballet has improved so much in the past 10 years. Mr Lin [Hwai-min (林懷民), founder of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集)] is always saying that Asian bodies aren’t built for ballet, so for the past two years we have wanted to bring an Asian ballet company here. We thought about the Central China Ballet, it’s very good, and the Tokyo Ballet — we really thought about which one we wanted to present,” Wang said in a telephone interview.
“We contacted a few, checked their schedules, and everything worked out for bringing Universal in the first half of the year. It’s close to our gala [the 2011 International Ballet Star Gala on April 9 and April 10], but we thought a full company first, then the gala, that would be OK,” she said.
Photo Courtesy of Universal Ballet of Korea
“At first we thought of doing La Bayadere or Don Q, you hardly see these in Taiwan, but then we decided on Shim Chung,” Wang said. “There are 70 dancers. It’s a very big company. The sets are very big, very good. They are world class.”
Universal Ballet was founded in 1984 under the auspices of the Unification Church’s Washington-based Korean Cultural Foundation. It has always followed a slightly weird approach to ballet: the first of several foreign artistic directors was an American (Adrienne Dallas), its style was Russian (based on the Kirov Ballet’s Vaganova style) and its ethos was Korean Confucianism (nothing too modern or sexy).
The company’s prima ballerina for many years was Korean American Julia Moon, who also served as the company’s general director and, more recently, took over the artistic directorship as well. Moon, the daughter-in-law of Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, grew up in Washington and danced with the Ohio Ballet and the Washington Ballet.
She has maintained strong ties with Washington’s ballet world through the Kirov Academy of Ballet, which was established by foundation and former Kirov Ballet artistic director Oleg Vinogradov, who also served as Universal Ballet’s artistic director for several years.
While the technique and staging in Shim Chung may have a Russian flavor and the ballet may have been choreographed in 1986 by an American (Dallas) to a score by another American (Keven Barber Pickard), the performance is based on a Korean folk tale that is an ode to filial piety. The character of Shim Chung is as famous among Koreans as Hua Mulan (花木蘭) is to ethnic Chinese or Cinderella to Westerners.
For those who don’t know her story, Shim Chung was raised by her father, a blind beggar. After learning that a gift of 300 bags of rice to the local temple will pay for a monk to pray for her father’s eyesight to be restored, Shim Chung raises the money by selling herself to a ship’s captain for use as a sacrifice to the sea gods if a storm arises on his next trip. A storm does erupt and Shim Chung jumps overboard. Upon arriving at the Sea Dragon king’s home, she discovers that her father is still blind and so she pleads to be allowed to return to the surface to find him. She is “reborn” from a pink lotus flower in a Korean king’s garden, and after much work and trouble, as is the way with fairy tale and folktale heroines, the human king falls in loves with her, they marry and after a long search, she is reunited with her father, who promptly regains his sight.
Among the dancers coming from Seoul will be 24-year-old Liang Shih-huai (梁世懷), the latest example of a Taiwanese dancer returning home to perform with a major foreign troupe — following in the footsteps of Batsheva Dance Co’s Lee Chen-wei (李貞葳) last fall and Pina Bausch’s Yu Tsai-chin (余采芩) more recently. Liang has been working with Universal Ballet for the past three years, but will leave the troupe after the Taipei shows — at least temporarily — because he has to fulfill his military service requirement in Taiwan before he can continue his career.
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