- TAIWANTODAY.TW - Taiwan Review - 01/Aug 00:00

Outward Momentum

A sophisticated performance venue offers global dance professionals a platform to browse the Taiwan zeitgeist. The Taiwan Dance Platform (TDP) launched by National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying) has made a huge difference in the development of small local dance companies. For Shimmering Production, a Taipei City-based dance group, the past few years have brought performances abroad, mainly in Europe, thanks to exposure to overseas curators through the platform since 2020. According to Wang Yeu-kwn (王宇光) and Lee Yin-ying (李尹櫻), dancers and choreographers who co-founded the group, TDP kickstarted international connections and brought their work to wider audiences. International dance professionals attend TDP 2024 at southern Taiwan’s National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Weiwuying). (Courtesy of National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Weiwuying)The top performing arts venue in southern Taiwan, Weiwuying is also a contemporary dance crucible that connects Taiwan artists with international peers. “The platform’s location is significant, as dance resources like higher education facilities have always been concentrated in northern Taiwan. Artists from southern Taiwan often had to stay in the north to broaden their horizons and develop careers,” said Chien Wen-pin (簡文彬), Weiwuying’s general and artistic director. “Through TDP we have established a mechanism that enables dance professionals from around the country to build international careers.” In Focus Every other year in the autumn, TDP showcases Taiwan choreographers and dancers at both ticketed and free performances. International professionals, including artistic directors, curators and producers, are invited to attend and evaluate interest for overseas audiences. Nina Hümpel, a German dance professional present at TDP 2024, was not only impressed by the broad range of dance Taiwan has to offer, from community dance to Indigenous cultural forms, but by the layout of the state-of-the-art performing arts venue. “In Kaohsiung, there is a single cultural center that combines all the prerequisites for a successful platform: inspiring architecture, large and small stages, foyer and open air performance spaces, and broad public access,” she observed. As part of TDP, international artists exchange information on the nuances of dance in their countries with peers in Taiwan. Artists like Germany’s Jan Möllmer host workshops in training, technique and kinetic expression for local dancers. Möllmer additionally choreographed a work for six young Kaohsiung dancers that reflected on dance itself and was presented at TDP 2024.“Hand in Hand, We Dance” at TDP 2024 is a community piece by Shimmering Production that features primarily amateur performers. (Courtesy of Weiwuying / Photo by Chen Chien-hao)“A Dancer’s Odyssey,” choreographed by Jan Möllmer from Germany and presented by Kaohsiung dancers at TDP 2024 (Courtesy of Weiwuying / Photo by Mon Lee)“TDP offers an opportunity for overseas artists to see something of the dance scene here,” said Chou Shu-yi (周書毅), international award-winning choreographer, dancer and curator of the most recent two editions of TDP. “It gives them an idea of what Taiwan artists are doing over the course of just a few days.” With vital international performance and collaborative experience, Chou was artist-in-residence at Weiwuying from 2020 to 2024, overseeing events and outreach projects involving Taiwan dance practitioners, the local community and international guests. He added that three Taiwan artists who lived and worked abroad for significant portions of their lives came back especially to present work at the event last year. In 2024 an exhibition of 10 films winnowed from 172 international submissions was held at Weiwuying and the city-run screening center, Kaohsiung Film Archive. The pieces include 2017’s “Manfei,” a portrait of the late dancer and choreographer Lo Man-fei (羅曼菲). She established a pioneering education path for dance from high school to graduate level and left a powerful mark on at least two decades of dance students; she remains a pivotal influence on dance in Taiwan.TDP includes a dance film exhibition, which screens 10 works chosen from international submissions. (Courtesy of Weiwuying)Leap Forward TDP’s Artist Pitching sessions, created in 2024, are a place for solo artists and small-scale dance companies to present partial works or concepts to overseas festival curators. Liu Guan-hsiang (劉冠詳) showed his work “Kids” at the first TDP, and from that event he went on to the 2017 Aerowaves Spring Forward Festival, which is a European dance discovery hub that chooses and showcases 20 emerging dance artists each year. Olé Khamchanla, center, from France provides guidance at the TDP 2024 Dance Workshop. (Courtesy of Weiwuying / Photo by Lee Yu-chi)Shimmering Production’s development is also closely linked to the Weiwuying platform. The company was founded in late 2019 with two main focuses: creating contemporary work and offering movement workshops to the general public. It was invited to present “Beings” at TDP 2020, which was well received and subsequently put forward for the Aerowaves Spring Forward Festival. In 2022 Shimmering Production presented the piece at Spring Forward in Elefsina, Greece. Picked up by curators there, to date the work has been performed in Germany, Japan, Portugal, Spain and the U.K. “TDP brings international professionals to see your work, and they pay attention no matter how little previous exposure you may have had,” Wang noted. On commission from Weiwuying in 2022, Wang collaborated with Indonesian artist Danang Pamungkas to produce “Islands” and show it at the platform. The piece later attracted development sponsorship from both Weiwuying and the National Theater and Concert Hall (NTCH) in Taipei. Through their relationship with TDP, Wang and Pamungkas became artists-in-residence in 2023 at innovative U.K. performance space The Place before debuting a new version of the work at NTCH in October 2024. Shimmering Production has taken other shows to TDP including “Hand in Hand, We Dance,” which stemmed from their dance workshops for the general public and features a group of women who gather in the southern town of Hengchun to move to Taiwan electro beats as a way to relax after days spent juggling paid work and family care. First devised in 2022 with a soundtrack of night market chatter mixed with pop, the piece was presented at 2024’s TDP and is part of Weiwuying’s ongoing brief to bring dance into the community, a move championed by Chou during his residency.Tjimur Dance Theatre perform at their home base in the southern county of Pingtung. (Courtesy of Weiwuying)In 2022 the Ministry of Culture began commissioning Weiwuying to present Taiwan artists’ work at the biennial Internationale Tanzmesse NRW, the world’s largest professional exposition for contemporary dance. Held in Dusseldorf, Germany, the 2024 event saw Taiwan hosting a roundtable conference on the self-identity of Indigenous artists from around the world and contacting peers including Hümpel, who was subsequently invited to Weiwuying. TDP’s dual role as a window onto Taiwan’s contemporary dance scene for international professionals and a gateway for Taiwan artists to perform abroad gains further momentum through events like cooperation between TDP and the state-backed National Culture and Arts Foundation, which in 2024 launched a project exclusively facilitating exchanges between Taiwan artists and curators based throughout Asia. As a result, about 40 dance professionals came to Kaohsiung for TDP, including 17 from nine countries and territories in Asia, a record high. “For a long time, Taiwan artists have looked to the West for inspiration, mainly because the previous generation of contemporary dancers studied there,” Chou said. “But today a younger generation of artists are interested in exploring Asian countries, too, which are culturally closer yet still tantalizingly unfamiliar.”   Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw