The National Theater Concert Hall’s four-year-old 1+1 Dance Series, an annual double bill featuring two choreographers whose small companies rarely command the National Theater’s main stage, returns this weekend.
This year’s program also continues the series’ format of pairing an established company with a younger one. Ku Ming-shen’s (古名伸) Ku & Dancers (古舞團) will perform Sadhu (沙度), while Bulareyaung Pagarlava’s Bulareyaung Dance Company (BDC,布拉瑞揚舞團台北首演) will perform his latest work, Qaciljay (阿棲睞).
The 60-minute Sadhu is a fairytale about modern life. It centers on a girl in red and a giant puppet, the aforementioned Sadhu — which is moved by 10 dancers — that the girl has created as she seeks to deal with her anxieties, stress and negative emotions. With Sadhu, the girl can explore her imagination and discover solutions to the problems that she encounters.
Photos Courtesy of Ku & Dancers
Like all fairytales, Sadhu has a message. Ku explores the triggers for anxiety and fear to show how to work through and reconcile those doubts through communication and trust. One might even say she is showing how to dance through life.
The show is strong reminder, if one was needed, that Ku, who is a well-known proponent of Contact Improvisation, can do more structured, narrative works as well.
She founded her company 23 years ago to develop and promote improvisation in dance. Contact improvisation focuses on the physics of motion and contact between bodies; it is about dialogue and communication. Ku sees improvisation as a force that can draw people together and encourage trust and understanding while exploring the abstractness of dance.
Photos Courtesy of Ku & Dancers
Ku is no stranger to National Theater commissions, having been tapped by its programming team several times over the past two decades to create new works, while this will be the first appearance of Bula’s year-and-a-old BDC, although Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門) performed his one of his works at the National Theater a decade ago, the powerful and disturbing Formosa, Island the Beautiful (美麗島).
Bula, who got his start as a choreographer with Cloud Gate 2 (雲門2) 16 years ago, has in recent years focused on pursuing and exploring indigenous themes in his works, especially those of his Paiwan culture.
With Qaciljay, which means rock in the Paiwan language, Bula expands on a show style featured in his work last year, La Ke (拉歌), which fused Aboriginal songs and storytelling with free-form dancing and modern choreography.
Photos courtesy of Bulareyaung Dance Company
While Ku’s piece is about dealing with the pressures of modern life, Bula’s is about pressures of history and traditional culture.
Qaciljay, set on eight men, explores the “singing body” and why indigenous people sing when walking in the mountains. Bula sees singing as another way of moving the body, of using the body to send communicate with others and to learn about ourselves.
At a news conference for the show, Bula noted that rocks and stones, when they roll down a hill or mountainside into a valley, it is not the end of their journey, but the beginning of new existence.
Photos courtesy of Bulareyaung Dance Company
Saturday night’s “1+1” show is almost completely sold out, while about 150 seats are left for Sunday’s matinee. The program comes with an audience advisory that there will be partial nudity.
Ku & Dancers will also perform Sadhu as a standalone program on June 11 in Tainan as part of the Tainan Arts Festival.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS