A Review of the Showcase of the 2021 Stray Birds Dance Platform
By Pearl Huang
Event: 2021 Stray Birds Dance Platform — Showcase
Date of performance: 25 December 2021
Venue: Taiwan Traditional Theatre Center — the Experimental Theatre
Length: 60 mins.
2021 Stay Birds Dance Platform (Stray Birds, 漂鳥舞蹈平台) is held from Dec. 24 to 26, 2021. It is the third year of this annual event conducted by the Hong Dance Company. The establishment of the Stray Birds was an exciting project for the dancers and choreographers of the young generation in Taiwan. It was founded by Lai Hung-Chung (賴翃中), a choreographer and the artistic director of the Hong Dance company. This platform provides opportunities for young choreographers to present their dance pieces; and be a bridge that connects Taiwan and the world, seeking international collaboration for the youth talents. The company has adopted three core elements in its development: Annual productions, the “international Collaboration Project” (ICP) and international tours.(1)
Stray Birds is one of the projects schemed for the ICP. According to the 2021 Stray Birds program booklet, choreographers who want to perform on Stray Birds are “encouraged to return to dance vocabulary itself, working with clear choreographic concepts, diversity in dance movement design, and energetic solos or duets.”(2)
Stray Birds always select works from other countries or those of international collaboration to follow its goal. This year, the platform was divided into two sections. The first section is the SHOWCASE; the other is the YOUTH WORKS.
The SHOWCASE consists of four dance works: Pardon by Tracy Wong (黃翠絲) and Mao Wei (毛維), Invincible Swiftness of Golden Crow by Lin Ting-Syu (林庭緒), Mr Papillon by Chen Lin-Yi (簡麟懿), and Let’s Leave This Place Roofless by Albert Garcia; all the choreographers have good experiences with international collaboration and performing in different countries.
PARDON
Pardon opens at the end of a lovers’ quarrel. We watched the dancers move within the illuminated rectangle formed by lights. Because of the pandemic, the local dancer Lee Kuan-Ling (李冠霖) danced with Wong instead. Lee and Wong push and pull each other with strength; the audience could feel the tension from strong resistance between them with their movements. Then they negotiated a truce, to a moody, minimalist score by Rafael Anton Irisarri. Wong and Lee didn’t dance to the music as much as they danced in and out of the shadows of the illuminated rectangles. The partnering is momentum-driven, rarely achieving a point of stillness or balance. The partners frequently connect by grabbing and twisting each other’s shirts and hair — not the usual trite clinches that litter contemporary dance, but strangely tender and destructive impulses.
Wong was a powerhouse on stage, dancing a series of organic caprices. She is one of those rare performers that give the illusion of no formal training, even though she said at the seminar after the showcase that this dance piece is complicated and need a lot of training and practice. Lee was a sensitive and gentle partner, slightly more subdued. At the close, Wong wrapped herself around him from the back, in a tight, codependent grip, her hair hanging over her face, her legs around his waist. Together they form an ungainly creature, gently swaying as they stare out at the audience with a slightly menacing effect. I believe most of the audience are disturbed and moved simultaneously.
Wong shared her choreography note when Pardon was performed in the 2015 Hong Kong Arts Festival Jockey Club Contemporary Dance Series, “It revolves around a story about me. It was something that had bothered me from a young age, but after so many years, I’d thought it had passed. It turns out I have just been escaping it. I realized I’ve become increasingly unable to articulate it through words, let alone facing it. My body thus becomes the best means of expression. I believe one’s feelings and experience is what’s real. Discoveries of the self from deep within, where one feels life from its most genuine impulse — I believe only through this, where one first move oneself, can one move others.”(3) For this, Wong indeed led us to the struggling experience in her memory and touched us with her dance.
INVINCIBLE SWIFTNESS OF GOLDEN CROW
To present the image of a red crown Shaman, the dancer Wen Yun-Chu (文韻筑) wore a black leg-showing split gown standing in the centre of a circle under the spotlight as the open visual of Invincible Swiftness of Golden Crow. In the sounds combined with several kinds of percussion instruments, Wen started to move her body strongly but slowly, squatting low to the ground and swinging her upper body and arms. It seems like she is proceeding with a ritual. Suddenly, she began to crawl, still firmly in every step and bend her body into different shapes. Sometimes it is human alike, sometimes like a specific creature that you just couldn’t name it. The red scarf on her neck symbolized her power; she twisted it all the time when dancing. And the dance also embedded some martial art movements, alternating between quick and slow steps and gestures; it’s a shaman with some spirits in her body struggling to transform itself into something else. Finally, when Wen bent her body backwards with a special gesture, the transformation had been done, the Golden Crow began to swift in the sky-high spiritually.
According to the introduction by Lin Ting-Syu, the choreographer, Invincible Swiftness of Golden Crow is a dance coming together with religious imagery and contemporary dance. It was inspired by the shapes and different types of idols that people worship in Taiwanese temples.(4) In Chinese mythology, the golden crow is known as the “Sun Bird” or “the three-legged crow”. This creature found in various mythologies and arts of East Aisa but was originated from ancient China.(5) Legends say it is an extreme divine being birthed from the sun’s core; therefore, it represents the sun and the magnificent power from heaven. Lin Ting-Syu adopted the creature into his dance to portray the divinity of the sculptures he saw in Taoism temples in Southen Taiwan, where he was raised.
MR PAPILLON
Mr Papillon was choreographed and danced by Chen Lin-Yi, a potential young choreographer who was a full-time dancer with the Japanese dance company Noism ( 2013–2016）and Hung Dance (2017–2019). He danced for Lai Hung Chung’s award-winning works Birdy and Watcher. Graduated from the Arts School of Dance, Taipei National University of Arts, Chen performs elegant and precisely. We can see the beauty and a lot of techniques of ballet in his work Mr Papllion.
In the darkness, the audience could only hear some voices; it seems like someone is stepping on the stage, running here or there rhythmless; and something is struggling and flapping its wings with solid breathing. After a while, we saw the dancer hang himself on a rope swinging in the glimmer. He jumped down when the lights were on and began to dance slowly and gracefully. With beautiful ballet movements, the dancer seemed to be making dialogue, trying to figure out something for himself. Bending, stretching, rising, jumping and turning on the toe of his right foot, the “dialogue” became stronger and stronger until he took off his upper garment. It symbolized the metamorphosis of a butterfly. The butterfly was so delightful; he danced elegantly in the flow of melodious string music. He flapped his wings (hands) and jumped, and turned, and stretched his hands with moving his slender fingers gracefully. He was rendering the fresh and free feeling of the butterfly to the whole space. In the end, Lee bent the bow to the audience and showed off a vast, beautiful butterfly tattoo on his back.
Chen Lin-Yi stated in the program booklet that this piece was inspired by the Zhuang Zhou dream (莊周夢蝶) in the Chinese classic Zhuangzi– The Adjustment of Controversies. (《莊子·齊物論》) He went, “ Once, Zhuang Zhou dream he was a papillon, flying freely, yet utterly unhappy. Suddenly he awoke, still believing himself to be a papillon. He was having a Zhuang Zhou dream; inside a human shell, slowing breaking out of his cocoon.”(6) He figured himself to the butterfly in the dance and finally “creaking opened the cocoon and stretching out the body to be free.” If this dance is a metaphor of himself, he struggled and broke out the barrier to be free spiritually; I will say it’s an excellent and beautiful dance piece. However, this is not the meaning and the concept that Zhuang Zi wanted to speak. Zhuang Zhou dream is a fable that Zhuang Zi wrote to tell people that we are all living in a dream, be it living in the form of a human being or a butterfly. And the dream is manifested from our own ego or imagination. In this case, Mr Papillon didn’t interpret the philosophy right.(7) This case once again reminds us of the importance of a dramaturg’s work. When adopting anything from classics or others’ works to recreate an artwork, doing research beforehand and understanding it well is a critical step, which will let the artwork match the level of what it should be.
LET’S LEAVE THIS PLACE ROOFlESS
One dancer lay on the floor at the right side; the other one went out and started to wrap herself around him. Like a creature of strange formation, they crawled together toward the “stage” that was ongoing constructing with red foam paddings, one after another. When the red rectangle padding stage was set, the dancer stood up and began to dance the duet tenderly. The duet danced their graceful sequences in harmony in accord with the melody. Then the light shaded on the stage, making a smaller dark rectangle in the centre. The dancers started to dance carefully on the left narrow edge of the stage, still in harmony. Their steps were so consistent that it seemed like they were puppets. Then the male dancer, Albert Garcia, also the choreographer himself, moved his step out of the red padding stage and started to lift it from right behind his side.
The fake stage began to be deformed by the force of Garcia; the visual strongly gave the audience the feeling that it symbolized the dancer trying to break the frame or shell that forced us to act like no spirits, even though it looked like in peace. The female dancer Yuan Yi-Chieh (袁以婕) kept her graceful dance until the last piece of the red padding were broken. She was like those who lived her routine life without deeper thinking even though she lived a puppet-like life under unfairness and injustice. In the end, all the dancers were disappeared, only an old-style radio machine left on the stage with a small piece of red padding beneath it broadcasting daily life dialogue between two local mammas. The empty feeling of this vision has hunted in the audience’s chests.
Albert Garcia is of Filipino descent raised in Macao. His mother is also a dancer and choreographer. He used the body as a medium for questioning, showing reflections of identity from a different perspective of the land of Macao. Gracia has an extensive choreographic career and has been invited to participate in international festivals. His works range from performance to visual arts, and he has collaborated with multiple artists in Asia and Europe, such as Yang Zhen, Hiroaki Umeda, Ho Hsiao-Mei, Ku Ming Shen, etc.(8)
CONCLUSION
It was an enjoyable experience to watch four good dances together in one hour. They all provide some profound meanings with beautiful choreographies. It shows us the potential and creativity of Asian artists. Many thanks to Hong Dance and Lai Hong-Chung for establishing this dance platform for potential young choreographers and dancers to fulfil their dreams. Furthermore, the ambition of this platform may construct a very good bridge for international collaboration between the artists in Taiwan and abroad.
Notes:
- 2021 Stray Birds Platform program booklets, pp3–4., Hung Dance Company, 2021.
- 2021 Stray Birds Platform program booklet, p3., Hung Dance Company, 2021.
- Hong Kong Art Festival official website, the introduction of Pardon:
https://cds.artsfestival.org/activities/pardon - 2021 Stray Birds Platform program booklet, p8., Hung Dance Company, 2021.
- The golden crow or the three-legged crow originated in Chinese mythology. Evidence of the earliest bird-sun motif or totemic articles excavated around 5000 BC from the lower Yangtze River delta area.
The Chinese have several versions of crow and crow-sun tales. But the most popular depiction and myth. of the sun crow is that of the Yangwu or Jinwu, the “golden crow”. See https://alchetron.com/Three-legged-crow - 2021 Stray Birds Platform program booklet, p9., Hung Dance Company, 2021
- The original text of Zhang Zhou Dream, please refer to the last paragraph of Zhuang Zi: The Adjustment of Controversies from the website of Chinese Text Project: https://ctext.org/zhuangzi/adjustment-of-controversies
- 2021 Stray Birds Platform program booklet, p10., Hung Dance Company, 2021.
