On September 20th-21st, the U-Theatre will return to the NCPA Dance Festival 2019 with its novel work The Colours. The U-Theatre, a performing arts troupe hidden in high mountains, will combine drum dance and splash-colour with modern technology to show the audience inner peace concealed in a bustling and complex world.
The Colours elaborates the collaboration between Artistic Director and Music Director of the U-Theatre.
The Colours is a classic masterpiece created by Liu Ruo-Yu, Artistic Director of the U-Theatre, and Huang Chih-Chun, Music Director of the U-Theatre, after many years of collaboration. Every clip is accompanied by music, revealing the U-Theatre’s understanding of Chuang Tzu’s mental realm. This is what is elaborated based on the spirit of the U-Theatre.
Dancers of the U-Theatre have a flexible body, which can move rhythmically.
The Colours was created with inspiration from calligrapher Dong Yang-Zi’s handwriting Voice of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, which touched Huang Chih-Chun so much. He saw a clear rhythm in Dong’s handwriting and perceived an inter-generating relationship between ink and colour, “ink has colours and the colours are born of ink”. Thus, he composed a new piece of drum music with the U-Theatre’s unique drum music, gong music, se zither music and bamboo flute music. Since the dancers practise Tai Chi all year round, members of the U-Theatre have a flexible body, which can move more rhythmically. Liu Ruo-Yu created a distinctively novel expressive style for the new drum music, successfully choreographing a very classic “U-Theatre-style” work.
The twirling and sinking movements of Tai-Chi training creates different style from the past works of U-Theatre.
Chinese calligraphy is written with ink, which has a single colour. In the calligraphy work, music director Huang Chih-Chun had felt the rhythm and tempo of calligraphy and further explored the philosophy of ink: “From the ink the five colors are equipped, and the colors will end in ink.” This work, which took many years for preparation, is an aggregation of all the artistic essences accumulated by the U-Theatre since its founding. With body movements and acoustooptical effects combined to the accompaniment of magnificent U-Theatre drum music, the whole performance looks like a dynamic painting full of vitality with the splash-colour painter Ke Shu-Ling’s drawing in projection.
The Colours creates a journey exploring both the ancient and the future.
Liu Ruo-Yu also said, “Ke Shu-Ling’s splash-colour painting contains strong feelings. When combined with the U-Theatre’s distinctive Zen music, the painting could create a journey to a five-dimensional space where there are both the ancient and the future. Also, the U-Theatre has skillfully combined its drum rhythm with the dancers’ body and the painting, creating its most colourful work of all time.”
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