Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalists

Visible and Invisible is an interdisciplinary dance work that comprises video, dance, and theatrical art forms. A streamlined stage design, repetitive physical movements, images of an unfamiliar city, and harsh cold mechanical sounds depict a sense of ennui and pressurized living environments for contemporary city dwellers. The work constructs an abstract and empty society as its backdrop, and offers a critique of the rigid and bureaucratic structures of contemporary society through the repetitive and unfeeling body. At the same time, it explores the fragmentation and helplessness between artistic creativity, human survival, and the times and society. Notably, the “emptiness” and “repetition” in the dancers’ movements are a profound expression of the extreme despair and repressive social environment of people in contemporary society, as well as a life stance that is oppressive and inescapable. (Commentator / Chih-Yung Aaron CHIU)

About the Work

The work is derived by Visible City, People Filled with Air, a piece created by Chou Shu-Yi during an art residency at the Taipei Artist Village in 2007. Starting from this piece that was nominated for the 7^th Taishin Arts Award, the choreographer collaborates with a design team of the new generation, and attempts to again facilitate a dialogue between a theatrical piece and contemporary society. Drawing inspiration from social and human suppression caused by urban renewal and rapid changes in life, Visible and Invisible utilizes realistic and non-realistic video images of cityscape, lighting, sound, stage, and costume to take up a challenge of setting up a real urban space in the theater, and tries to answer the questions: “In what way and pace do we live?” “What invisible power relations are hidden in the city?”

About the Artist 

Founded by choreographer CHOU Shu-yi in 2011, the objective of the dance company is to create works based on the environment they grew up in, making it an experimental site of body aesthetics.  Chou collaborates with dancers and artists to cultivate the art of dance as well as the culture in Taiwan, hoping to create an ideal medium and communication between art and society through each individual project, and to provide an alternative perspective on viewing the environment through the contemplation on the society reflected in the dance.