This is an astonishing dance performance. The three masked men, almost naked, use their bodies to create visions, dreams, and nightmares of primal shapes - or humans as machines, or blinded or stupefied creatures, all combined with fully intelligent, aware, exhilarating dancing.
Incredible discipline and miraculous synchronisation
The dancers (Kuan-Ling Lee, Kuan-Ying Ong and Chien-Tao Liao) have incredible discipline and miraculous synchronisation as they flow from movement to movement, mirroring each other, or creating complex sculptures of interdependent movements. Sometimes the bodies transform into bewildering mechanisms, reminiscent of surreal versions of ancient ballistas or boat swings or something Da Vinci might have dreamt up.
The music has a recurrent soundscape of bass synths and drums similar to the music in the film Arrival, yet there is a variety of music and tone as changes in the music mark the commencement of new perspectives or stages of the dance.
A sense of progression can be detected; the spectacle moves from primordial slime, to developing the use of limbs as tools, to caterpillar shapes, to figures reminiscent of classical sculptures of Laocoön. There are sequences of elegance and grace, as the creatures become individuals and then develop awareness of the external world and even of the audience. The creatures develop awareness of the music and begin to dance to the beat. Near the conclusion of this ‘ascent of man’ we move to machine-age tyranny where the dancer's movements are controlled externally and they are drilled to exhaustion.
The choreographer, Po-Hsiang Chuan, was inspired by notions of entanglement, pathological interdependence and external validation and the notion of life-cycles, and these themes swell and fall throughout the performance.
In the final stages we have journeyed from the frenetic drives of evolution and the psychological costs of technology to the show's final movements of community, peace and transcendence.
