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Taiwan Season: Lost Connection

 
Mark Harding Review by Mark Harding 5 Published: 8 Aug 2024 Summerhall Show Dates: 1 Aug 2024-25 Aug 2024

Sometimes a dance production is so stunning it leaves your brain unable to engage with your tongue: this is such a show – Lost Connection is a fitting name in more ways than one.

A bit rate of ideas running at 120 megabits per second.

It opens with a dark stage where the performers, each transfixed by the mobile phone held in front of their eyes, dance around the lit screens like moths. But this show is not a cold intellectual parody, programmatically reviewing the impact of mobile phones but is driven by intense creativity, excitement and passion.

There is a seemingly endless sequence of dance scenes involving different techniques and focusing on different themes – fantastic solos, intense duets, astounding quartets – supported by effective changes to the lighting and the dynamic, stirring music (excellent throughout).

The inventiveness of Wen-Jen Huang’s choreography is astonishing, with a bit rate of ideas running at 120 megabits per second. Faces distort in the lights of the phones – at one point the movement of the lights and bodies create a strobe effect that elongates mouths and eyes like a long exposure photograph. Bodies are distorted – or perhaps it is better said that new types of creature are being created – heads merge, torsos merge, arms merge; dancers combine into entities resembling deep sea creatures or space aliens. Shadows are used to create surreal bodies like Dali or H.R.Giger figures, or multi-limbed sculptures.

The dancers, powered by enough energy to run a data centre, move at fibre-optic speed through isolation, conflict, sharing and confinement – and not all connection is lost – there are also moments of affection and depth of relationship.

The intensity is so great that the 40 minutes of the piece seems to flash by in a heartbeat.

The exhilaration and joy of this show is to see mind-bogglingly imaginative dance performed at full five-bars exuberant tilt. An absolute treat.

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The Blurb:

Addicted to any mobile devices or know others who are? If so, Wen-Jen Huang's restlessly swift, hot-wired dance quartet should produce jolts of recognition. Her dynamic new work is based upon the contemporary socio-cultural phenomenon of phubbing (paying more attention to one's mobile, etc. than to the people you're with). Guided by the choreographer's laser-like kinetic intelligence, the dancers slice and slide through space with a desperate, unpredictable energy. Fair warning: their self-absorbed, pressure-cooked state of being could be both exciting and distressing. European premiere.