Su Wen-chi, choreographer and dancer of Brussels-based Kobalt Works, is scheduled to perform her latest creation “Remove Me” at the Guling Street Avant-garde Theater in Taipei June 12 and 13.
The performance will examine, through digital media and dance, the relation between the senses of the body and psychological feelings, she said. “With this dance, I break away from the creative methods that I have always used,” said Su, a dancer from Taiwan who later moved to Belgium. “I look forward to sharing my European experience with audiences in my country.”
Su captured the Jury’s Special Award May 1 with her solo dance “Heroine” at the 8th Taishin Arts Award. The dance tells the love story and career struggles of Su, in which she dances with only her upper body and legs while fixing her feet to the ground. By showing the tension between two different body languages, Su hoped to “express as much freedom as possible within a limited framework.”
The dance, the brainchild in 2005 of Su and Artistic Director of Kobalt Works Arco Renz, is based on Su’s life in Belgium. “Arco is my partner. Because of dance, our life and work were tightly bound together. But when I moved to Belgium, we were less familiar with each other than we should have been,” said Su. “It is because of the gap that we created this dance about the power struggle between lovers, our love for each other and also our clashes,” said Su.
“The piece is also a reflection of my life as a dancer,” she noted.
Su, now 33, spent her early childhood years playing in the dance center her mother owned. She had been a dance student until college, when she switched to French as a protest against the life of a would-be dancer.
“I wondered if I could really be a dancer on my own terms, as I envisioned—instead of trying to live up to the expectations of my parents and conforming to all the rules I had learned,” said Su.
In 1998, encouraged by her high school dance teacher Liou Shaw-lu, Su picked up dance again when she was a sophomore college student. She joined the Taipei Dance Circle, of which Liou was the artistic director.
Daunted by fellow professional dancers’ outstanding performance at first, Su quickly pulled herself together and became fully devoted to dance. She was later selected to perform in “Ode to a Paramecium” (1999), “Black Tide” (1999) and “Faults” (2000) with the dance group.
In 2001, during a performance tour in Singapore with Taipei Dance Circle, she met Renz and later joined the Kobalt Works in 2002.
Su, who spends her time between Belgium and Taiwan, is currently enrolled as a graduate student at the Department of New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts. (TYH-HZW)