Knitting cultural ties

 French cultural festivals like La Fete in Bangkok do not come to Taipei though: given the frequency of French arts events, they would be redundant. The strong cultural ties between the two countries were also evidenced when I attended the Biennale de la danse a Lyon in 2000, where I first experienced Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, a troupe regarded as the Taiwanese ambassador of dance.

Last year, that close cultural relationship gave birth to delectable fruit called “Yo Gee Ti” (Chinese for “organic”), a dance collaboration between the NTCH and Mourad Merzouki’s Compagnie Kafig from the National Choreography Centre in Creteil and Val-de-Marne.

Huang Pi-Twan, the artistic director of the NTCH Chiang Kai-Shek Cultural Centre, came up with idea and approached Merzouki after Kafig staged “Recital”, an outdoor hip-hop performance, for about 5,000 spectators during TIFA 2009, a few months before La Fete introduced the company to us with “Terrain Vague” at the Patravadi Theatre. 

Huang told France’s Le Monde newspaper, “The idea was to promote hip-hop in Taiwan, where the overall skill level remained amateurish, and the aesthetics had a tendency towards showbiz”.

Merzouki wrote in the house programme of “Yo Gee Ti” that he was captivated by the energy of the dancers who shared the stage with his company in 2009. A year later, NTCH held an audition in which 80 local hip-hop dancers participated. But there was a problem: “These dancers could not be considered professionals. Therefore, we had to change plans and go for a more modern interpretation,” Huang noted.

Finally, Merzouki picked five Taiwanese dancers with backgrounds that vary substantially. Prior to the 2010 Lyon Biennale, he commented: “I was amazed by their technical mastery. These dancers are from a major school of contemporary and neoclassic dance, so they have incredible precision, a strong sense of movement, the ability to memorise dances, and attentiveness to the music to a degree that’s not often found in hip-hop dance.”

For months in 2011, the five Taiwanese dancers and the five French hip-hop dancers travelled back and forth between Taipei and Paris. Merzouki, whose company has been performing around the globe and who has previously succeeded in this kind of intercultural collaboration in, for example, Brazil went on to explain his rehearsal process. “I mostly worked on images, and concentrated on the dialogue between hip-hop and contemporary dance, on how to blend these two types of gestures without ever swinging too far one way or the other. The idea was to have just one type of dance, so we spent a lot of time developing a shared set of gestures that would fit both hip-hop and contemporary dancers. That was my main focus.” 

It was also in 2010 when Merzouki visited an exhibition by local fashion designer Johan Ku at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Ku’s works are known for their sculpture-like look and use of unique textiles as he breaks the boundary between fashion and art. Merzouki once again found inspiration and Ku came on board as the costume designer for “Yo Gee Ti”.

Last June, “Yo Gee Ti” opened the Festival Montpellier Danse and in September ran almost the entire length of the Biennale de la Danse a Lyon, before performances in other French cities, garnering positive reviews and not only from the French and Taiwanese press. 

France’s Le Monde newspaper wrote, “Chinese brush strokes soften angles; punchy hip-hop spices up personalities. Amid a nocturnal atmosphere with aquatic accents, groups of fires gently attack, freeing individual sparks. Amid violins that scratch or caress, between Eastern languor and Asian streamers, each duo’s steps thrust them into strange physically combinations”. Canada’s Dance International magazine concurred: “In the course of this West-meets-East encounter, Merzouki seems to have discovered new possibilities. Amid the predictable bursts of high octane break dance in ‘Yo Gee Ti’, there are moments of poetic calm, transcendent beauty and wonderful strangeness.”

The UK’s Dancing Times magazine’s dance critic called it “a strange, otherworldly atmosphere of almost meditative beauty,” and his Financial Times compatriot noted that “Yo Gee Ti” is “mostly seamless in its abstract invention and musicality, a vision of how hip-hop can still be stretched as a genre.”

I watched “Yo Gee Ti” last September in Lyon, merely six hours after arriving in the city after flying in from Bangkok. I fully concur with the critics quoted above and would add that the performance’s immaculate creativity completely cured my jet lag that afternoon at the Maison de la danse, the French counterpart of the Sadler’s Wells in London and the venue at which I watched Cloud Gate 12 years earlier.

As part of their Asia tour, “Yo Gee Ti” was back where it started, in Taipei, the weekend before last, and in Bandung, Indonesia last Saturday. After Saturday’s performance in Bangkok, it will travel to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Macao, Shanghai and Peking. It is thanks to La Fete that we are able to catch this widely acclaimed work on its limited tour. 

In fact, “Yo Gee Ti” reminds me of “Pichet Klunchun and Myself”, another cross-cultural dialogue, albeit on a smaller scale, which travelled to many cities around the world between its start at Patravadi Theatre’s Fringe Festival in 2004 and its end at Vic Hua Hin as part of la fete 2012. And now that la fete is aiming for more collaboration and exchange, we can enjoy “Yo Gee Ti” and take it as a prime example of things to come.

 

HIPPITY-HOP

>>> “Yo Gee Ti” will be performed at the Aksra Theatre in the King Power Complex on Saturday at 8pm. 

>>> Tickets are Bt800 and Bt1,200 (Bt400 for students) at ThaiTicketMajor.

>>> Visit www.lafete-Bangkok.com and www.CCNCreteil.com.

>>> Merzouki will serve as a jury member in the Hip Hop Battle on Sunday, starting at 1pm, at the Alliance Francaise de Bangkok. Admission is free.