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Taiwan Season: Trace of Belief

 
Stephanie Green Review by Stephanie Green 5 Published: 2 Aug 2025 Assembly @ Dance Base Show Dates: 31 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

Deceptively simple, Trace of Belief, choreographed by Hsieh Yi-Chun, is a captivating, dreamlike dance that deepens and grows on the viewer. Exploring, through temple processions and rituals, the experience of prayer – from the quietly meditative to the ecstatic, and applicable to any religion – it asks what we can put our faith in within an agnostic world. Is there still something beyond ourselves we can believe in?

Belief in self, belief in dance – that is what matters

Multicultural, melding classical Chinese and Western contemporary dance, this is a subtle and delicate piece featuring dancers of remarkable flexibility and expressivity, accompanied by a soundscape flavoured with temple bells, Chinese drums, gongs, cymbals and suona (Chinese trumpet).

Starting quietly with the sound of water drops and birdsong, six dancers – three male and three female – dressed in brilliant blue wide-legged trousers flecked with white, stand together, slowly swaying. As one dancer breaks away then turns and returns to the group, another follows. Later, more complex groupings evolve, suggesting that there is strength in unity, while individual solos speak to the need for independence. The piece becomes not just about religious experience but also human relationships. The beauty of this work is that it allows the audience to bring their own experience into it and interpret it as they wish.

A particularly dramatic section features two men in painful rapture, their use of feathered fans – symbols of spirituality but also of male power – enacting the self-destructive potential of such intensity, as one turns his fan against his own abdomen.

The choreography is skilfully varied, delighting with unexpected shifts in mood and style. Audience members may recognise Tai Chi movements and delight in the raised knee with bent foot, a gesture from Chinese opera, as well as Chun’s signature low pliés and fluid, circular movements, which she associates with flowing water – all combined with Western balletic lifts.

The final section features Hsieh Yi-Chun herself, semi-naked and standing only in her underclothes, offering herself to the audience as if to say: this is who she is. Belief in self, belief in dance – that is what matters. Trace of Belief may not transport you in the way that a louder, more in-your-face piece might, but it may subtly transform you.

Amir Nisi

Stephanie Green

Stephanie Green has reviewed Theatre and Dance in Edinburgh since 2011 but previously travelled widely, mainly in Eastern Europe and Russia, writing about puppetry. She also studied shadow puppetry and sacred dance in Bali. In the 1970s, she trained as a puppeteer at the Little Angel, London and later worked at the alternative In the Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. After training at the Place, the London School of Contemporary Dance, in her 20s she then gave up dancing until starting again in her 60s just for fun. She has recently danced in a community group with Barrowland Ballet (at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2013), Oceanallover and at the South Bank, London as part of the Festival of the Silver Age. She is also a novelist, playwright and poet. www.stephaniegreen.org.uk/

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Choreographer Hsieh Yi-Chun makes an impressive international debut with a brand-new ensemble dance about collective ritual and individual will. Inspired by temple processions and childhood memories, her mesmerizing sextet uses a flow of dynamic movement to pose a key question: what anchors our faith in an ever-changing world? Merging past and present, sacred and secular, tradition and modernity, this sensitive and searching production surges with a heightened sense of spirituality. At the same time it is deeply rooted in communal humanity. The result is cross-cultural dance of great power and universal resonance.
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