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Taiwan Season

Every year at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I look forward to the Taiwan Season. A curated selection of shows within the organised chaos of the festival, the quality of the dancing is always exemplary. I caught two out of the four shows of this season’s offering.

Performance

Taiwan Season: “Lost Connection” by Seed Dance Company / “Palingenesis” by D_Antidote Production 

Place

DanceBase, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 2024

Words

Roísín O'Brien

“Lost Connection” by Seed Dance Company. Photograph courtesy of DanceBase

The first is “Lost Connection” from Seed Dance Company, choreographed by Wen-Jen Huang. We open on one dancer staring bleary-eyed into a harsh white light held in their hand. Grey circles painted around their eyes make them seem slightly unwell.  Within the enclosed theatre space, this pinpoint of light is particularly striking; you flinch, wanting to turn off this bright invasion. Yet we seem oddly used to this intrusion from our phones when we’re doom scrolling in bed at night.

Under an increasingly hostile soundtrack of alarms, beeps, notifications, news items, and phone calls—the unrelenting busyness of a digital world—three more dancers join in, likewise glued to these devices. There’s relief, then, when more light diffuses through the stage, and we lose the handheld lights. The dancers slide softly across the floor, easily through split legs or crouched positions, hunched over. They physically interact with each other, taking each other’s weight, but do not seem to consciously connect. They manipulate their stretchy grey costumes; heads are rammed into taut fabric or strained through gaps. The choreographer’s use of entrances and exits on and off the stage is just as creative as the movement onstage, with the dancers falling, crouching or hopping onto each other’s shoulders as they cross the fourth wall.

After this technically astute main section, the devices are brought back, and the theatre darkens again. Perhaps nothing has changed; the addiction continues. I’m not sure if the choreography dug into or gave any new insights on how our digital devices dictate our lives. But “Lost Connection” is very competently danced, and my eye still half-twitches at the memory of that pinpoint of harsh light.

“Palingenesis” from D_Antidote Production. Photograph courtesy of DanceBase

Later that same day, I see “Palingenesis” from D_Antidote Production, choreographed by Po-Hsiang Chuang. The lights come up on three nearly nude, collapsed figures lying on their backs, their knees fallen to one side. All the dancers wear a skin-coloured mask, whose mouth is pulled into a grimace and the eyes large and criss-crossed with wide slits. Are these figures humans, gods, resuscitated mummies, aliens?

From this prone position, “Palingenesis’” choreographic drive is one of constant mutation. Tightly joined together, the dancers morph through different connections, evolving then regressing as they lift up, straddle, or pull each other down. They move through inversions as though their bodies don’t obey gravity in the same way as we do. When they do break apart, we have some fun. Their strutting bodies perform surprising ripples through their hips, and the picked-up energy in their movement is matched by an increase in pace in the music, as though these creatures are navigating a new world.

What sets “Palingenesis” apart is how well Chuang knows how the human body can fold. He explores the body’s malleable capacity to surprise you and create unexpected choreographic beats; or to show you extremities, as the dancers frequently drop into deep squats. Or, even more, to visually trick the audience into forgetting the separate nature of the three dancers’ bodies and instead show one wholly new creature. Overlapping limbs and the dancers’ ability to weave through architectural gaps in each others’ skeletons, means we see stretched legs coming closer to torsos than we would like, some trippy structural alignments, and more moving legs than a bipedal creature should have.

All of this is performed under a likewise rich yet unfussy soundtrack, that moves from reverberating, spacious, and deep creature-like sounds, to swelling strings, before we come back to a pulsating soundscape (possibly including, or referencing, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s excellent soundtrack for the film Arrival). Once again, the dancers end as they begin; but the brighter light and tinkling piano signals at rebirth. There seems to be more hope in the air, and certainly more sweat on the stage. “Palingenesis” is a very engrossing and committed forty minutes, a work of conceptual dance that commits to its intent with skill and flair and is performed effortlessly by its talented performers.

Roísín O'Brien


Róisín is a dance artist and writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She regularly writes for Springback Magazine, The Skinny and Seeing Dance, and has contributed to The Guardian and Film Stories. She loves being in the studio working on a new choreography with a group of dancers, or talking to brilliant people in the dance world about their projects and opinions. She tries not to spend too much time obsessing over Crystal Pite.

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