The first and best known Taiwan contemporary indigenous dance theatre. Kurakuraw‧Glass Dance Bead at Edinburgh festival fringe 1-24 August 2014 (not 4,11,18) 6:30 pm Dance Base (Venue 22) Full £10.00 Concession £8.00 【The performance is so dreamily handsome.】 This is the most refined of the four dance productions in the Taiwan season split between Dance Base and Summerhall. It’s the work of Tjimur, a company jointly run by siblings Baru and Ljuzem Madiljin and described as Taiwan’s ‘first and best-known contemporary indigenous dance theatre.’ The key elements are a singing storyteller (fashionably dressed in traditional garb) to one side of the stage, a cellist and a female singer (both fine if sparingly used) on the other, and in the middle two sleek, strong dancers enacting an elaborate, rather melancholic folk tale about a male peacock (Ching Hao Yang) who falls for a beautiful village girl (Chu-Yuan Hsu). Luckily, the performance is so dreamily handsome that theres no need to worry unduly about following a strict narrative, any more than I felt I had to be steeped in the cultural traditions referenced here in order to derive pleasure from the experience. The choreography features swinging arms and pitter-patter hops for the woman, and a sturdier, swirling mode of expression on the part of the bird-man. The tone is one of elegant romance and lamentation, an impression underlined by a diagonally placed river of red fabric upon which half a dozen shallow wicker baskets ‘float.’ Source: The List Date: 12 August 2014 Written by: Donald Hutera
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 08:16:28 +0000
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