Author/ Lu Hong Wen (specially invited writer, currently serving as a project critic for Performance Art Reviews, NCAF)
The Chaotic Time
If you want to go to the bus station closest to the rehearsal place of Tjimur Dance Theater, i.e. the Sandimen Township Office station, from Pingtung train station, there are only 6 runs of scheduled buses a day, with the latest one at 6:00pm. If you are going to the Shuimen Station, which is a little bit further, there are more runs of buses available. However, after you get off the bus, you need a private vehicle to take you to the destination. Or you can walk instead, though the way to the destination is an uphill road and it takes 20 to 30 minutes on foot.
The reason why this traffic information is placed in the very beginning of this article is not to highlight how difficult it is to get there. The reason is that the mass transportation network and its design are similar to those in Hualien, where I currently live. In the modern civilization, people on this island follow the 24-hour clock system, which confuses the time system based on experiences. In the place with myths, perception of the natural environment, and memories of the family migration, the degree of chaos is even higher. Here, time does not flow at a uniform speed. And the so-called modern civilization is not really as promised. Graces are given to everyone, yet they are given with differences based on classes. As a result, we all dream about a better tomorrow.
According to Baru Madiljin, the dance director and choreographer of Tjimur Dance Theatre, Sandi Village in Sandimen, where the Theatre is located, is one of the earliest communities to exchange with foreign cultures. Therefore, the elderly in the community were aware of the possibility of losing their own culture in very early days. For this reason, they started to make records and tried to pass on the features of the traditional life to the next generation. When a tradition is discovered and defined, its seesaw-battle and dialectic relationship with the present day begins.
The time from India
In the afternoon of the first day when I arrived the space for group rehearsal and performance, three dancers of Kaishiki (Kaishiki Nrityabhasha) and three dancers from Tjimur Dance Theatre were practicing together “Shakti”, the new dance work by Daksha Ji (Daksha Mashruwala) for this exchange. According to the choreographer, the purpose of this dance work was to explore female power. Without words, the embodiment of the process of childbirth in this work, alone with the formation of the dancers like a flower blossoming, allowed audience to easily feel the female energy and make associations based on it.
This is one of the features of the dance works Kaishiki brought for this exchange. “Pallavi” is a pure dance work. When I watched it, I barely made any associations. “Invocation” is always performed in the beginning of Odissi Dance (Odissi). And “Abhinaya - Ashtapadi” is an epic work by Daksha Ji to simply express a love story of Indian gods. In all these works, there is a kind of ambition of narration in the static designs and dynamic movements. Although the audience in Taiwan was not familiar with Odissi Dance at all, like everybody, they loved stories and were able to understand these works through the stories. Thus, in Kaishiki’s new dance work “Rainbow Serpent”, the appearances of those animals could always cause some commotions in child audience. When Yu Cheng interviewed the dancers, one of them mentioned that the Natya Shastra describes dancing as “your eyes are where your hand gestures are. Your heart is where your eyes are. Your feelings are where your heart is. And your style is where your feelings are (note: this is a rough translation by the interviewer).” This idea can be considered as some kind of mantra of Odissi Dance. Although the origin of this type of dance is ceremonies, how to make connections with all mortal beings who make formal visits to temples and who watch performance was already taken into consideration a long time ago.
However, all these inferences following a rational line need to be questioned first. During the British colonization of India, under the suppression, Odissi Dance was once almost lost. All the movements and techniques passed down today rebuilt by the few artists left based on the embossments on temples due to the need of national consciousness after the independence of India. If people think of some things as traditions in order to meet their contemporary needs, in Odissi Dance, the traditional and the contemporary seem to be the two sides of a coin. The result is a contradictive and weird situation. When Odissi Dance is identified as a traditional and classic dance, it is obviously the product of the modern revival movements. Yet, in the dance works brought by Kaishiki, leaving aside the classic choreography, the meanings and techniques of the two new dance works are not necessarily related to the present day. They are more likely extensions of the traditions. Of course, this interpretation of mine may lead to another trap. Perhaps, ancient thoughts and old narratives should not be divided based on time into the traditional and the contemporary at all. It is like the unique perspective of the universe in Indian myths. In these myths, time is not measured on an equally divided scale.
The time of the Paiwan people’s entanglement
This time entanglement throughout the colonization period and the modern civilization is reflected on Tjimur’s dance works, choreographer, and dancers, no less than Kaishiki in India. The indigenous people had been through the triple oppressions of the colonization of the Qing Empire, Japan, and R.O.C. With every different government, they had to get used to a new time view. The memories of the history with their ancestors living here can only survive in the cracks between various culture-related policies.
During my stay in Sandimen, there was a wedding of a Paiwan couple. The guests attended the wedding in traditional clothing of the Paiwan people. In the wedding, people did the four-step dance in circles, with aboriginal love songs and folk songs played by electronic pianos instead of ancient tunes. After the dance, the guests in traditional clothing left on motorcycles. Traditional things and modern things can be used together based on needs. I can wear a traditional suit to show my ethnic identity and respect. And to save time for transportation, I can ride a motorcycle instead of walking. These choices seem simple. Yet, in daily life, it is as difficult as walking a tightrope to maintain a balance. After all, with the promises of convenience and happiness of the modern civilization in front of us, we already built an association between the uncivilized and the inconvenient. Nowadays, if we want to pick up what was discarded, we have to face the pressure from others while integrating traditions into our lives instead of making rigid rules.
During this exchange, Tjimur Dance Theatre performed a segment from the new work “Varhung ~ Heart to Heart”. The title of the work to the “anemaq (what)” shouted by the dancers reveal the inevitable depression caused during in the process of entering the present time. And it’s even harder for indigenous people to talk about their melancholy and sense of loss as their time and languages have been distorted by the external forces. To make things worse, nobody cares.
In “Varhung ~ Heart to Heart” and “Déjà Vu in the Memory”, a work choreographed by Baru for the dancers from both groups, audience can see the limb and rhythm elements extracted from the Paiwan dances and music stressed by Baru, the choreographer, and Ljuzem Madiljim, art director of the Theatre. All the performances during this three-day exchange began with the whole staff of Tjimur Dance Theatre singing a happy get-together song of the Paiwan people together accompanied by the four-step dance. In contrast, Baru’s vocabulary for choreography was very obvious. There is an explanation behind those steps with low body positions and flexibility of the body movements based on rhythms.
The rhythms in these dance works were sometimes interrupted by the dancers’ rapid spinning or jumping movements. The center of gravity and the way to maintain balance would change within a split second. If we consider those rhythms as the choreographer’s questions and temporary answers regarding the bodies of the Paiwan people, then the disappearance of rhythms can be considered as the interferences of western choreography techniques and dance trainings. Or can it be considered as a way to maintain balance like riding a motorcycle while wearing the traditional clothing? Asking this question may seem like splitting hairs. Yet it is essential to ask it, as the question of what the subjectivity of the Paiwan culture is involved while the dance group claimed to “use the subjectivty of the Paiwan culture”. Of course, cultural subjectivity is composed of various and complex elements. However, the difference between being able to identify these elements and just getting accustomed to it without calling it in question is that in the former case one can see people dance with the vocabulary of the Paiwan movements while in the later case one can only see Paiwan people dance. To be more specific, in the former case, identification with and devotion to this lifestyle are more important than blood relationships.
Where we stitch up time
This exchange was not possible without the subsidy from the Ministry of Culture, which was a big relief in the financial aspect for the two dance groups. However, there is always some kind of ambiguous policy direction behind national art subsidies or organizations being supported. Yet, this article aims to focus on the influences of the history views and cultural backgrounds of the two dance groups on their production during their encounter. After all, as a drifting Chinese living in the city with a very low sense of history, seeing this meeting in Pingtung of the two groups which still carried the long histories, though somehow intermittent, and heritage still led me to unspeakable admiration and mixed feelings evoked by the circumstance.
In “Shakti”, the dance work by Daksha Ji from Kaishiki, the Taiwanese dancers were requested to fully implement the Odissi Dance techniques. And the blocking was mainly based on symmetric or circular patterns. At first glance, senior audience with a lot of experiences of watching contemporary performances might find the images delivered through the dancing movements or the well-organized blocking somewhere out of date. However, during the performance on the first day of the exchange event (I only watched the performances on the first two days of the three-day event), the resonance of the dancers’ energy caused some joyful atmosphere shared by those on the stage and those off the stage. This was probably the ideal state Odissi Dance aspires after, a state with sincere connections with audience.
The performances of the three Tjimur dancers in this work are also worth mentioning. Dancer Meng Tzu En was able to grasp most of the detailed techniques to use muscles in Odissi Dance. If this exchange can be continued in the future, she can definitely show incredible result of integration. Through the techniques with expressions in the eyes and hand gestures stressed in Odissi Dance, the other two male dancers Yang Jing Hao and Ljaucu Tapurakac developed more enchantingly and charming qualities in Shakti, a work celebrating female energy, showing how the classic techniques used in Odissi Dance were connected with the contemporary tracks.
Audience familiar with Tjimur Dance Theatre would definitely find some familiar elements in Baru’s “Déjà Vu in the Memory”, such as the dancers’ body rhythms with their hips as their axle centers and the steps from the four-step dance. Baru decomposed the traditional dances of the Paiwan people into elements and combined them with the limb elements from the Odissi Dance. Therefore, during group dances, the audience could see the dancers from the two dance groups switch over from one limb habit to another. The Indian dancers always made some small mistakes in repeated rhythms, while the Taiwanese dancers just weren’t able to be as agile and nimble as the Indian dancers when it came to eyeball movements in Odissi Dance.
In the final section of the work, the choreography allowed the tension between the dancers of the two groups being revealed. The one-on-one match between the two groups began. This section was the climax of the whole show. The section arrangement, the phrase structures, and the theater space arrangement proved Baru was very experienced in contemporary dance choreography techniques. However, what I was curious about was what else he would extract from the traditional culture of the Paiwan people after this, as the rhythms, the steps from the four-step dance, and the use of numbers had all been included in his dance works more than once. Compared with Tjimur Dance Theatre, the indigenous dance groups currently devoted in developing contemporary dance works all place their focuses on more than one group. That’s why they haven’t been stranded at a bottleneck. Thus, for Tjimur Dance Theatre, perhaps it is now a key moment to find out how to extract more movements from Paiwan people’s daily lives which can, in turn, prove the existence of the subjectivity of the Paiwan people.
With so many words used to describe the exchange of the two dance groups, I still can’t fully express my feelings and thoughts as an observer. Yet, I expect to see this exchange continue. An experience of the encounter with others helps one, through similar or different historical situations, to see his own hidden time stream which is chaotic and broken. And the possibility of fixing and stitching up this black hole of time and space is also hidden in it. The most difficult part is to see it in the first place. This exchange was just a beginning. The two groups did not experience any conflict caused by the collision of their core concepts about bodies and dancing. For example, the desire of narration hidden in limbs in Odissi Dance was omitted by the choreographer of “Déjà Vu in the Memory”. And the issue of the three Taiwanese dancers hadn’t had enough time to practice Odissi Dance before performing in “Shakti” wasn’t dealt with. What lied behind this issue was the differences in inheritance and training between the two types of dances. All kinds of problems will occur when encountering different cultures, making original difficulties even more complex and labyrinthine. However, when the original road is blocked, it is time to open a new path, looking for a solution at once in each other’s lives.