Tournée asiatique : TAIPEI Mai 2010

A last-minute program change failed to stymie the Novel Hall Dance 2010 series

By Diane Baker / STAFF REPORTER

The Novel Hall Dance 2010 series did not get off to an auspicious start. One of Emanuel Gat’s dancers fell ill, so Rite of Spring had to be scrapped. When you are just a 10-member company, understudies don’t exist.

What Taipei audiences got in exchange was extraordinary — an expanded version of Gat’s 2004 Winter Voyage duet with Roy Assaf, a 50-minute piece called Winter Variations that premiered in June last year.

The show opened with Silent Dance. It was a good introduction to the company and to Gat’s minimalist style. The company was attired in T-shirts, pants and shorts, largely in shades of gray, which proved to be the color scheme for most of the program.

Gat is credited with the choreography, the lighting and the costumes for all his pieces, so he obviously sees a world that is less black-and-white and more an ever-shifting palette of gray that runs the gamut from ashy-white to almost black. It is a deceptive simplicity helps the audience to focus on the reason they’re there: Gat’s choreography.

The curtain rose on Silent Dance with the eight dancers lined up along the back of one-half of the stage. One woman strode forward, took a position and then began to move. At first the dancers stayed to one half of the stage, but they soon moved out across the floor, eyes always on one another, measuring pace, measuring space, even if they were just centimeters apart.

In Silent Dance the only sounds you hear are the squeaks of feet moving across the floor, the thumps of multiple feet landing at the same time, the dancers’ breathing. The choreography is a swirl of kicking legs and arms, a solo here, a duet there, sometimes several dancers echoing or mirroring the moves of another — and then a sudden pause for a tableau.

Six men and two women, and the most amazing thing was how real they looked, like average people you might see on the street as opposed to, say, the sleek whippets of Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance who appeared at Novel Hall last year.

When the stage went dark, the dancers moved off to a round of applause and you could just make out the figures of two dancers taking their marks on stage. When the lights went up, Gat and Assaf, garbed in long, sleeveless tunics over black pants, began the 14-minute Winter Voyage, set to three lieders by Franz Schubert.