Qiu Shan's dance piece "Eight Eight" returns to Kaohsiung to gaze at the disaster and the meaning of life in the land

The last section of the dance piece "Eight Eight" performed by Qiu Shan, expounding on reflections on the existence and disappearance of life (provided by the Cultural Affairs Bureau)

[Reporter Huang Jialin/Kaohsiung Report] "Eight Eight" created by the Kaohsiung contemporary dance group "Qiu Shan" will return to his hometown for the first time on the 27th and 28th, and will be staged at Pier Zhengang Small Theater. The work uses the Morakot typhoon that hit Kaohsiung Jiaxian in 2009 as the creative starting point. It combines contemporary dance and folk religious rituals, leading the audience to re-examine the disaster and the meaning of life in the land.

The fourth section of Qiu Shan's dance piece "Eight Eight" shows the exchange between the body's energy and the virtual and real body. (Provided by the Cultural Affairs Bureau)

Choreographer Lin Tingxu said that since he was not a witness to the Typhoon Morakot disaster, he was unwilling to speak for the victims arbitrarily, let alone project his personal imagination onto the suffering of others. Therefore, "Eight Eight" does not directly reproduce the cruel disaster scene, but uses him to personally visit Jiaxian for field inspections, actually participate in local rituals, understand folk belief culture, and try to use the body to re-experience people's emotional state when facing death, loss and memory.

Kaohsiung City Cultural Director Wang Wencui pointed out that "Eight Eight" successfully transformed local historical events into contemporary artistic vocabulary, demonstrated Kaohsiung's amazing contemporary dance energy, and guided the audience to think about the relationship between man and nature, man and land; this work not only responds to the collective memory of Kaohsiung people, but also implies Lin Tingxu's choice of his mother to become a nun, and his long-term exploration of life and death issues.

On the stage, the three dancers transformed the concept of "Bachao Keyi" in Taiwanese folk belief into body language full of tension. Sometimes they vibrated violently as if pulled by invisible forces, and sometimes they were twisted and entangled under the pressure of strong external forces, vividly showing the fragility and tenacity of life in the face of impermanence. Combined with live percussion, electronic sound and large-scale stage equipment, it creates an immersive sensory shock.

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