The eyes of the nation will be on the Taipei Municipal Stadium tonight as the opening ceremony of the 2017 Taipei Summer Universiade gets under way at 6pm, including friends and family of the hundreds of Taiwanese dancers, university students and high-school students who will be performing.
Given one of the themes of the local and international advertising that Taipei has been running for the Games is “Taipei in Motion,” it should come as no surprise that dancers were given a key role in the welcoming event. If there is one thing that dancers know even more about than athletes, it is motion.
Wang Yun-yu (王雲幼), dean of Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA) School of Dance, was asked to be the chief production director for the Games.
Photo courtesy of Zhang Xiao-xiong
Asked how long it took to pull the show together, Wang laughed and said the process began in January last year, when the storyline was finalized and she could start to invite choreographers, schools and dancers.
Three directors were chosen for the three cultural program segments of the ceremony: Anarchy Dance Theatre founder Jeff Hsieh (謝杰樺), theater director Liao Ruo-han (廖若涵) and visual artist Lin Kun-ying (林昆穎).
Wang said she wanted young, mid-career professionals as choreographers and designers because she wanted to promote youth, and she also wanted to highlight the nation’s wealth of professional dancers, as well as its dance students.
Photo courtesy of Hibbard Nash
About 100 modern dancers and more than 900 dance students are taking part in the ceremony, Wang said.
National Taiwan University of Sport, the National Taiwan College of Performing Arts, TNUA, Hwa Kang Arts School, the Aboriginal divisions and dance divisions at five municipal senior-high schools and four junior-high schools in New Taipei City and Taipei are contributing performers.
Many of the choreographers have their own companies, which meant they had to set aside their own work to help — such as Horse cofounder Su Wei-chia (蘇威嘉); Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe director Fangas Nayaw; and Benson Tsai (蔡博丞) of B.DANCE.
Others are freelancers, such as Tung I-fen (董怡芬) and Shen Yi-wen.
Wang also wanted to get Taiwanese expatriates involved, so she recruited Martha Graham Dance Company principal dancer Chien Pei-ju (簡珮如) and Billy Chang Yi-chun (張逸軍), a former soloist with Cirque du Soleil, to perform, and Lin Li-chuan (林立川), who danced with the Atlanta Ballet and other companies, to choreograph.
Some of the choreographers started going to the schools in February to work with the students, but the real training began in April, Wang said.
In the past two weeks everything moved into high gear, with rehearsals at TNUA, the small stadium next to the Taipei Municipal Stadium and at buildings at Taipei International Airport (Songshan airport).
The entire cast and production had their first full dress rehearsal on Tuesday night and a second one on Thursday night.
The performers feel they are “performing for the entire nation, to show that Taiwan is not so small a place,” Wang said.
For Chien, the invitation from Wang to join the cast was a welcome chance to come home to perform.
“I didn’t think much about it, just said yes,” she said in a telephone interview yesterday. “It was a dream come true. Living in New York for 10 years, I have wanted to come back to perform and had been planning to come for the last three years, but things didn’t work out before.”
She arrived back in Taipei about two-and-a-half weeks ago and immediately began rehearsals.
“It’s been crazy this week, running back and forth between the studios at TNUA in the morning and the stadium in the evening,” she said. “It is exciting, but at the same time tense because everyone is trying to do their best.”
An added difficulty for Chien is that she will actually be dancing on LED panels, or “dancing on a big TV,” as she put it.
“As a dancer on stage, I always have to take care of my movements, my emotions, my acting, but now I have to worry about how I look on the TV,” she said. “But it’s very cool.”
The cultural segments of the performance aim to highlight Taiwan’s past, present and future under the themes nature, city and technology.
The first, titled “Vibrant Island,” will highlight Taiwan’s Aboriginal and local culture, and features a performance by Puyuma singer Sangpuy Katatepan Mavaliyw.
The second, “Hybrid Taipei,” aims to convey the sights, sounds and tastes of the city, and will feature performances by Chang, rock band Boxing (拳) and Amis pop singer A-Lin (Huang Li-ling, 黃麗玲).
The third segment, “Global Tribe,” highlights Taiwan’s digital connections with the world and features Chien’s solo, violinist Tseng Yu-chien (曾宇謙) and Taiwanese-American singer and actor Wang Leehom (王力宏).
Wang’s portion of the finale will be interactive for those inside the stadium, who will be able to participate by downloading an app that will turn their phones into instruments.
While tickets to the opening ceremony are sold out, it will be broadcast live on TV and the Internet and shown on six big screens set up in the Taipei City Hall plaza.
An undersea cable to Penghu County has been severed, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said today, with a Chinese-funded ship suspected of being responsible. It comes just a month after a Chinese ship was suspected of severing an undersea cable north of Keelung Harbor. The National Communications and Cyber Security Center received a report at 3:03am today from Chunghwa Telecom that the No. 3 cable from Taiwan to Penghu was severed 14.7km off the coast of Tainan, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said. The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) upon receiving a report from Chunghwa Telecom began to monitor the Togolese-flagged Hong Tai (宏泰)
A cat named Mikan (蜜柑) has brought in revenue of more than NT$10 million (US$305,390) for the Kaohsiung MRT last year. Mikan, born on April 4, 2020, was a stray cat before being adopted by personnel of Kaohsiung MRT’s Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station. Mikan was named after a Japanese term for mandarin orange due to his color and because he looks like an orange when curled up. He was named “station master” of Ciaotou Sugar Refinery Station in September 2020, and has since become famous. With Kaohsiung MRT’s branding, along with the release of a set of cultural and creative products, station master Mikan
RISING TOURISM: A survey showed that tourist visits increased by 35 percent last year, while newly created attractions contributed almost half of the growth Changhua County’s Lukang Old Street (鹿港老街) and its surrounding historical area clinched first place among Taiwan’s most successful tourist attractions last year, while no location in eastern Taiwan achieved a spot in the top 20 list, the Tourism Administration said. The listing was created by the Tourism Administration’s Forward-looking Tourism Policy Research office. Last year, the Lukang Old Street and its surrounding area had 17.3 million visitors, more than the 16 million visitors for the Wenhua Road Night Market (文化路夜市) in Chiayi City and 14.5 million visitors at Tainan’s Anping (安平) historical area, it said. The Taipei 101 skyscraper and its environs —
Taiwan on Friday said a New Zealand hamburger restaurant has apologized for a racist remark to a Taiwanese customer after reports that it had first apologized to China sparked outrage in Taiwan. An image posted on Threads by a Taiwanese who ate at Fergburger in Queenstown showed that their receipt dated Sunday last week included the words “Ching Chang,” a racial slur. The Chinese Consulate-General in Christchurch in a statement on Thursday said it had received and accepted an apology from the restaurant over the incident. The comment triggered an online furor among Taiwanese who saw it as an insult to the
RSS