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by Bilqis Hijjas
There is a scene in Bulareyaung Dance Company’s tiaen tiamen analogous to my experience of the performing arts in Taipei in April this year. A group of men is huddled on the enormous dark stage. One man wields an electric torch. The men run around him in a circle as he whirls the torch, catching them in its beam like an old-fashioned zoetrope. You get a sense of enormous coordinated movement, of the disciplined training needed to produce this deceptively simple effect, but also of many unseen moving parts, unknowable to a person like me parachuting into the country for only a week.
I was in Taipei as one of the ArtsEquator Fellowship of arts writers from the Southeast Asian region, meeting in the flesh for the first time, supported by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia. We were piggybacking on Taiwan Week, a showcase of Taiwanese performing arts targeted at international theatre presenters. The shows were hoping to be picked up for arts festivals and programs across the world, and they allowed us to enjoy a range of high-quality performances, while giving us fodder for group discussions, and a little insight into the Taiwanese arts scene.
Taiwan Week was also a chance to ogle Taiwan’s new theatrical jewel – the Rem Koolhaas-designed Taipei Performing Arts Center – and to be bowled over by recent tech breakthroughs in VR. But as a dance critic, to me the visit was primarily an opportunity to take the temperature of Taiwanese contemporary performing arts as expressed by two flagship dance companies: Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and Bulareyaung Dance Company.
The all-male all-Indigenous cast of Bulareyaung Dance Company performed to a full house in the National Theater, a grand venue which combines ornate pagoda roofs with sparkling chandeliers. In the full-length work tiaen tiamen Episode 2, fabulous shifting projections of geometric shapes and runic glyphs designed by reretan pavavalijung slide across every available surface of the cavernous stage. Live singing by indigenous Paiwan performer Kivi is pumped up with a massively-reverbed synth soundtrack designed by ABAO. A vast sea of silk fabric, at one point raised like a monstrous mountain that sucks men in towards its maw, ends up dancing above the stage, manipulated by eight puppeteers.
With this production, artistic director Bulareyaung Pagarlava is like a kid in a candy store, rambunctiously trying out everything that theatrical wizardry has to offer. tiaen tiamen (meaning “me and us” in Paiwan language) is a cornucopia overflowing with multi-coloured visual spectacle, celebrating a new economics of Indigenous abundance. But to my foreign eyes, unfamiliar with the cultural tropes and having not seen Episode 1, this can tip into incoherence. Characters enter and exit without apparent reason and relationships remain opaque, as crashing earthquake-like soundscapes climax and dissolve without leaving a trace.
Only one scene came into focus for me: a tightly-crafted duet of two men silhouetted against the raised silk, engaged in a languid romantic encounter. Deft use of backlighting makes their silhouettes grow and shrink, concentrating our attention on physical details. Two hands reaching towards each other, then fingertips delicately parting, is rendered as large and deliberate as a filmic close-up. In the midst of all the sturm und drang, it was simple things like this that struck me as insistently human.
At first glance, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s work Sounding Light, by artistic director Cheng Tsung-lung and performed at the company’s zen-like centre in the hills to the northwest of the capital, seems to embrace an aesthetic of stripped-down minimalism which contrasts entirely with tiaen tiamen. But make no mistake, Sounding Light is quiet luxury at its finest. The boxed white stage, as pristine as an empty gallery space, is lit by Lulu W.L Lee with an effect of shifting filtered sunlight, like a plunge pool fed by glacial spring water. The dancers, the skin on their bare backs streaked with colour, wear pale neutral-coloured bottoms and transparent tops, baring nipples as nonchalantly as catwalk models. It all looks very expensive and in very good taste.
For Sounding Light, inspired by the sudden quiet during the pandemic lockdown, Cheng had to train his already exquisite dancers to be musicians as well as movers. Together they build tongue clicks, humms, finger snaps and body percussion into a dense sonic pattern designed by Lim Giong and Chang Shiuan. This they combine, in an impossibly complex feat of coordination, with Cloud Gate’s characteristic virtuosic movement. Deep massed squats evoke a colony of frogs, while duets with pursed fingers and cocked legs suggest mating rituals by pairs of elegant egrets.
Once again, one scene emerged strongly to me from this immaculate, slightly bloodless, affair. A small woman steps out of the group, her raised face radiating hope, to take her turn at a solo. As she moves, she whistles. Her whistles, although syncopated, inform her movement, speaking of wonder, of the impulses of energy that initiate movement, of a sense of performative generosity. Like a sparrow snapping at flies, she grasps at things in mid-air, exhibiting an appealing approachability which seemed exceptional to me, in the midst of all the gorgeous display. Perhaps, to the eyes of a small Southeast Asian, it takes someone similarly small to appear real.
During my visit to Taiwan, sometimes it was difficult not to feel like a country bumpkin gawping at the wonders of the metropolis – so impressive are the resources available to artists in Taiwan, as well as the artistic freedom in which they seem to operate. Is this by design? Taiwan Week is, at least to some extent, a performance of soft power: a demonstration of Taiwan’s national sovereignty through its cultural exceptionalism, from its spotlight on gay rights, to the studied sophistication surrounding sex and nudity, and to the mainstreaming of celebrations of Indigenous identity.
From my perspective as an arts worker who values artistic liberty, human rights and cultural funding, this all seems right and good. This is how public money should be spent! But as a visitor from a region also deeply influenced by Mainland China’s geopolitical flex, it’s hard not to read all of Taiwan’s cultural product as a response to a looming threat. There is a suggestion of fin de siècle decadence in all the opulence.
Approaching the climax of Sounding Light, the performers surround a single acrobatic dancer, clapping and stamping as he moves, backing up when he comes too close, before moving in again. Suddenly the stakes seem higher, the tone hotter, as the crowd pulses in its appreciation of the individual mover. Then the dancers form two lines, women in front, men behind, and dive into a frenzy of percussive slapping and stamping, as accented and passionate as flamenco. Still, the choreography is kept tight, the dancers as taut as bowstrings performing at the height of their capacity: physical, clean, focused.
But somehow the accumulated power is allowed to dissolve without coming to a head. The dancers start to drift off, clicking, whispering, whistling. The lights shift over the single dancer who remains. Slowly she moves to a foetal position on the floor. The lights blaze, the whiteness becoming uniform, before the sudden blackout.
Let us hope this is not the final hurrah, before the dark closes in.
All images in this review are borrowed from the websites of Bulareyaung Dance Company and Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan.
The ArtsEquator Fellowship Critics Network is made possible with the support of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Malaysia.