M Dans

HORSE’s inaugural dance work M Dans was born from the collective minds of five top-notch dancers/choreographers – CHEN Wu-Kang, YANG Yu-Ming, CHIEN Yi-Cheng, SU Wei-Chia and CHOU Shu-Yi, all of whom love to dance, can dance and are full of ideas about dance. M Dans hopes to present an observation on the beauty of the male body in contemporary cities. It wants to break away from the qualities and temperaments associated with modern-day men and reflect the changes over time and aesthetic differences. In a female-dominated dance circle, this performance attempts to create a unique choreography language. It is also a chance to show the diverse creativity and vitality of young emerging choreographers and dancers and declare the formation of a new force in dance arts.

M Dans is a collection of six dance pieces created by a group of male choreographers, each of which addresses a different subject and is performed in a different format. All of them, however, reveal a world of fantasy pictured by men. Words Unspoken, a dance piece tailor-made by visiting Israeli ballet master Igal Perry, is imbued with European neoclassical dance moves and cleverly incorporates Bach’s music into the mix. It digs into the physical uniqueness of four dancers, who perform solos or duets in no specific roles but may once in a while engage in ambiguously flirty interactions – sometimes hugging and playing with each other like close brothers while at other times fighting ferociously like beasts.

Yazoo, the work of world-renowned choreographer Eliot Feld, gives the ballet body a human touch and sees CHEN Wu-Kang’s body at full display. On a minimalist stage, fluently moving contours create strong cohesion and also excitement for dancing. SU Wei-Chia’s Match manipulates the three-dimensional space between the dancer’s body and a pull-up bar. CHEN Wu-Kang’s Who explores a self-discovering journey with the abstract language of dance. Former Cloud Gate dancer Cheng Tsung-Lung’s King goes back to the body for its initial passion for dance. CHOU Shu-Yi’s Door Opening, the gold medalist at the Taiwan’s National Creative Dance Competition, attempts to use the narrative techniques of dance theater to portray an inner collective body and individuals – a never-ending dialectic process between the internal and the external and between the worldly and the innocent.