Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

With space as the main axis, Successor reinvents the East Second Hall of Huashan 1914 Creative Park through three sets of dance performances and space designs in three weeks. The HORSE Dance Theatre teams up with Volume-Collectif and eleven performers from other dance and drama disciplines to present the solitude in modern time. The work is philosophical, experimental, and technical, challenging people’s stereotype and existing ideas regarding space; at the same time, the work showcases compound and volatile theatrical effects and symbolic meanings.   Committee member: Chao, Yu-Ling

Artwork Introduction

The large-scale exhibition and performance piece Successor I, II, III takes three different forms over the course of three weeks, offering varied interactions between dance, sound and visual components. It proceeds in the direction of questions/memories/responses, continually experimenting with its own viewing and environmental experiences. It presents an exhibition in the daytime, when the audience can freely explore the space through its visual and acoustic components, and a live performance in the evening, through which the audience is introduced to and invited into the space itself.

The exhibition’s sound art component employs unique handmade devices, which allow audience members to roam to specific locations within the space according to various schemes, exploring a collection of soundscapes from cities and from various places around the world. Its visual installation component, based on concepts from urban landscape design, attempts to fuse the dissimilar but connected designs of the exhibition space and the stage through personal works made with found objects, such as everyday recycled materials. In its performance component, the physical arrangement of limbs, through its varying configurations, aims to establish an improvisation that represents an organic method.

About the Artist

Founded in December 2004, Horse Dance Theatre has established a distinctive profile through evocative physical movements and exhibiting a distinctive performance style in a series of works that display unfettered and unbounded creativity. The New York Times has called them “a charming and imaginative young all-male dance troupe from Taiwan.” In their fourth year of establishment, Horse was nominated for 6th Annual Taishin Arts Awards and honored with the Performing Arts Award.