Chou Kuan-jou’s Tomato. Photo © Lucas Kao

review, article

Taiwan Festival London 2024

Read

8 min

Chou Kuan-jou’s Tomato. Photo © Lucas Kao

Georgia Howlett

03 May 2024

Tech, tailfeathers and tomatoes feature in the dance outings of London’s Taiwan Festival of contemporary arts

The first major festival of Taiwanese culture to grace London makes its home at The Coronet Theatre. This ‘Victorian jewel’ is a darkly lit, antiquated secret of a theatre, to which the festival brings a landscape of creations both ultra-modern and traditional. It’s a feast for the eyes and a pleasant contradiction. Dance and theatre makers present their work surrounded by free events featuring VR, thematic beverages, and serene installations of Taiwanese craftsmanship, extra elements that evoke the wider artistic context of Taiwan’s contemporary arts scene.

The audience are limbered up by the soothing curves of Cheng-Tsung Feng’s exhibition of architecture, gently enclosed by bamboo curtains, and the performances that follow do not stray from ambitious visuals. Second Body, Birdy and Tomato use varying degrees of spectacle to attract and maintain the eye, but also probe deeper than the visuals they play with. Bodies are spotlighted in starkly different ways, using technology, tailfeathers and of course, tomatoes.

Chao Ting-ting in Second Body, directed by Chieh-Hua Hsieh for Anarchy Dance. Photo © Cheng Ching-ju

Anarchy Dance, directed by Chieh-Hua Hsieh, present Second Body, almost a decade old, with technology brewed long before its 2015 premiere. A screen-obscured tech team conjure soundscapes that carve depth with noises both intimate and distant. Bodyless footsteps echo delightfully throughout the Coronet’s cave. Centre stage, which is cast as a white square, a nude figure is barely visible. In her white wig, Ting-Ting Chao systematically trials her blank canvas body, hands first. She is fascinated with her own limby exploration. To us, the movement is emotionally 2D, though it is clear it preludes something greater.

Second Body really begins when a monochrome map projection seeps like honey across the stage, before it consumes Ting-Ting Chao from the feet up; a glorious swallowing of her form with a projection hitting her from three angles. Her skin becomes oscillating textures – silk, gritty pixels, water and flames – as the music swells to a spaceship-like swoon. When she dances again, as before in that linear, restless but ultimately tidy way, the textures on her skin are ruffled into array. The visual spectacle of watching the dancer wriggle into new skin is wholly satisfying, like an outrageous party trick.

The projections are mapped onto the body using motion capture. Chao’s movement agency dictates the interaction of the textures on her skin, but she shares the space with a greater presence, a hint towards our subscription to a digital age. Hsieh wanted to explore how technology changes the way we receive information from a body. Is the digital body referencing the presence of our technology in our minds and skin, or the potential paved for human bodies by the steadfast progression of inhuman technology? Second Body does not make us ponder such things through its movement, but does use highly advanced effects to render this body immortal, suspended between what we know as a human body, and what we don’t know of what it might become in the future.

I-han Chen and Kuan-ling Lee in Birdy, by Hun-Chung Lai for Hung Dance

Birdy presents two bodies as chronically contradicted. Hung Dance, formed only in 2017, express gratitude for the international connections ensured through ICP (International Collaboration Project), and Hun-Chung Lai’s duet expresses an indecisive blend of influences. Tai Chi, traditional Chinese opera and street dance popping are all evident, as if tried on like outfits. The choreography does, however, commit to a phrase. Each idea – a burst of sparring touch, a release of gooey ripples, a flurry of flighty spins – is given the appreciation it deserves.

Extending from the dancers’ heads is a pheasant tailfeather, often worn on warrior helmets in traditional Chinese opera to reflect power and skill. When Chen and Lee move, it follows and then returns to its perfect, upright position with the soft delay of a light trail. Though a passive presence, it exerts curious effects on its wearer. In Chinese culture, only the elite are afforded a tailfeather like this one. It is fought over, hence the combative relationship between the dancers, but with the honour of status comes the burden of possessing it. Birdy draws on the freedoms and restrictions present in Taiwanese society. The paradox is palpable in the duet, even if vague when discussed post-show, due to polite avoidance of political conversation.

The urgent certainty with which the dancers move is limited by a resistance. And yet it is also hard to really believe their struggle; perhaps because of the gormless, teetering run wedged between impressive phrases of duet, or the fact that the utter command of their own bodies renders any weakness doubtable. That said, a sense of muscular structure unfolds in wonderful contrast with the spinal, liquid ripples of the feather; a bird in flight. The considered, visual spectacle of Birdy is to be appreciated.

The possibilities of the feather are almost exhausted, but the piece is revitalised by metaphor: it becomes a knife to cut the Chen’s throat. Over and over, she crumbles before being thrust back onto her feet to endure it once more. Only moments before, Chen had written in the air with the feather as a pen, while Lee writhed, mimicking the shapes of the letters with his body. Director Lai does express that words, in the hazy boundaries that exist between true and false, are more powerful than a sharp weapon, a reserved yet haunting implication for Taiwanese society.

Trailer for Kuan-Jou Chou’s Tomato

The spectacle of Kuan-Jou Chou’s Tomato is of a messier kind. The sultry Coronet setting lent itself to a raunchy show, albeit offset by the binbag tunics provided for the front row, and childlike laminated signs of ‘you might be splashed!’ Three performers, including Chou, share the stage with a glass box of tomatoes. On a TV screen, a camera view projects footage both close up and fetishist, and the camera itself passes between them. A voiceover explains the steps one must follow in tomato selection. In a devilishly clever twist, the audience become the tomatoes – see it to believe it.

Received well at Edinburgh Fringe (2022), experimentation and risk were anticipated, although I look forward to the day that works of a lustful nature aren’t referred to as inherently ‘risky’. Chou explores lust from a feminist perspective – though the terms of lust are decided by societal narratives. Tomatoes are the lucky candidate for metaphor, the vessel for expression. For 30 minutes of fruit porn, the sexual references are ripe. In one moment, the performers slowly pass two tomatoes between their three bodies, skin never touching. This cheeky game, plus the fact that we didn’t get splashed all that much in the end, suggest an element of constraint, a fulfilment unreached. They mock their own feverish insatiability. Using antibacterial spray as a tool for pleasure, they imply that cleanliness does not coexist with their chosen sexual lives. To Chou, Taiwanese people lack the words to articulate their desire, a society that contains lust in a certain form. The anticipation of the tomatoes – mostly tucked into nooks and crannies – eventually bursting, mirrored that of desire, and the image of a tomato erupting through the fingers of a clenched fist is a brilliant, exasperated esponse to this problem.

Chou devotes her practice to the what she calls the Lust Body. Using fluid sexuality, dry humour, and self-acceptance, she hacks away at boundaries. Other than bin bags, few boundaries protect us. However, the prying voyeurism of the camera is mainly directed onto the performers, and the hilarity of their urges leaves us tickled, a little shy but not uncomfortable – merely blushing the colour of fruit they frolic in. In light of the conservative, somewhat abstract presentation of bodies in the preceding performances, Tomato seems a joyful, open invitation, calling dance to the lust party, and pleasure to dance.

Today, only 12 countries recognise the Island of Taiwan as a country, rather than Chinese territory. An unstable independent identity, and the imposition of the Martial Law from 1949 to 1987, inhibited free exploration of the arts, and frames the emergence of modern Taiwanese dance as it is seen today. As shared by Lai Hung-chung, the refinement of distinctively Taiwanese movement language is ongoing. Nevertheless, the festival’s hybrid of digital finesse, flirtation and body agency reflects an intelligent collective mindset attuned to forward thinking, and a devotion to works of visual wonder. ●