Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

Objects found in the everyday life, such as cigarettes, a jacket, and a telephone, are used to interweave a relationship between a man and a woman. Particularly, the use of the jacket creates the visual magic. This work inherits the expressive form of theatrical dance, but presents an utterly distinctive aspect informed by perceptiveness and imagination. The dance is a fluid manifestation created by the physical language, characters, and visual imagery. A man lighting up a cigarette, a giant jacket, hysterical phone ringing, and the Chagall-like floating bodies of weightlessness have represented the danger, loneliness, and yearning in a relationship. (Commentator: LIN Yu-Pin)

Artwork Introduction

The Man is a collaboration and co-creation by TIEN Tsai-Wei and Jan Möllmer, dancer at the Folkwang Tanzstudio (FTS). The concept of The Man aims to explore the interactions in the self-other relationship that take place between dreams and reality in the form of dance theatre. Under ordinary conditions, there is a distinctive dichotomy between the self and the other. However, such a deadlock state can be shattered in dreams, bringing about new opportunities to transform the original antagonistic relationship into harmony. Most dance topics that feature dyadic relationships in the past tend to directly establish the subject/object dichotomy to investigate issues such as affection, dependence, alienation and anxiety from both sides. On the contrary, this production breaks the distinction between the subject and the object, considering everything the subject's self-projection as the subject searches for the possibility of integration. Additionally, this production tries to incorporate into the dance the dialectical thinking of yin and yang from Chinese philosophy as a way to look for the possibilities of new directions and integration in the interactive relationship by diminishing the difference between the self and the other. 

About the Artist

TIEN Tsai-Wei is a dancer at Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Baush in Germany. After graduating from the Department of Dance at Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan in 2008, TIEN started studying dancing at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Germany and graduated in 2011. Afterwards, she joined the Folkwang Tanzstudio while collaborating with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Baush as a guest dancer until 2015. She became a dancer of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Baush in August, 2015, and has remained there ever since. TIEN has won the Bronze Award at the 3rd Beijing International Ballet and Choreography Competition in 2015, the 2nd Prize and Audience Prize at the Internationales Tanztheater Festival Erfurt, and the Newcomer Prize and Audience Prize at the International SoloDuo Festival in Cologne, Germany, in 2014.