December 20th – 22nd, 2024 Taipei Performing Arts Center, Taipei December 27th – 29th, 2024 NPAC Weiwuying, Kaohsiung January 3rd – 5th, 2025 National Taichung Theater, Taichung 35 minutes
The School of Dance of Tapei National University of the Arts (TNUA) is staging Pina Bausch’s classic work, The Rite of Spring, for its fall production in Taiwan – the first Asian reproduction authorized by the Pina Bausch Foundation.
The reproduction, a highlight of this year’s Kuandu Arts Festival, will take the dance to Taipei, Kaohsiung and Taichung for a total of nine performances running from December 2024 till January 2025.
Made possible after two years of planning by the School of Dance, the restaging of the legendary choreographer’s work will feature TNUA alumnus Yu Tsai-Chin, a dancer from Wuppertal Tanztheater, together with four other dancers who received training under Bausch.
The restaging of The Rite of Spring marks the international recognition of Taiwan’s higher education in dance, particularly the heights that the TNUA School of Dance has reached.
Bausch’s The Rite of Spring premiered in 1975, and has since become a classic in the world of dance.
November 8th – 10th, 2024 National Performing Arts Center, Taipei November 15th – 16th, 2024 Rohm Theatre Kyoto, Kyoto November 20th, 2024 The Museum of Art Kochi, Kochi December 10th, 2024 Theater im Pfalzbau, Ludwigshafen December 18th – 19th, 2024 Auditorio de Tenerife, Santa Cruz de Tenerife January 25th, 2025 Teatro Municipal da Covilhã, Covilhã Feburary 7th – 9th, 2025 Perth Festival, Perth 75 minutes
Collective identities are sources of belonging and inclusion but when they become mainstream, they can turn the other way around. I can recognise this issue in dance.
In CARCAÇA, a very diverse cast of ten dancers, including Marco da Silva Ferreira, and two musicians form an unconventional and joyful corps de ballet. The dancers perform intricate footwork that merges standardized folk dances with contemporary urban dance styles that mainly appear in groups that were or are considered minorities (for example LGBTQIA+ communities or communities from ex-colonies). In this choreography, Marco da Silva Ferreira uses dance as a tool to investigate communities, the construction of collective identity, memory and cultural crystallization. In other words: what if folk dances had not crystallized, had continued to redefine themselves and had incorporated the present at every moment?
The cast explores their collective identity in a physical, intuitive and unpretentious flow of the body, dance and cultural construction. They start from familiar footwork, coming from clubbing, balls, cypher battles and the studio and they use the physical vocabulary of the contemporary, social, urban context as a lexicon of identity (house, kuduro, Top Rock, hardStyle, etc.). Through a slow and structured construction process they connect these styles with the heritage and memory of dances from the past. These standardized and unchanging folk dances have remained stagnant and have not been able to integrate new definitions of bodies, groups and communities, which were considered inferior. For these groups it was necessary to break with the authoritarian, totalitarian and paternalistic past.
In CARCAÇA an exercise is proposed that integrates the past and the present. The performance makes you think: How do you decide what to forget and what to remember? What is the role of individual identities in the construction of a community? What is the driving force of an identity? What world does the individual and collective body traverse? Or, better put, what bodies traverse the world?
