Comments on the Finalist

This work begins with the end of life, unveiling its fundamental questioning about death and life with ritualistic scenes. The choreographer Hsieh Chieh-Hua boldly constructs an eerily splendid journey with the visual “experience” of a bardo belonging to a virtual dead and “represents” the path that connects the world of the living and the dead, through which the lifeless can physically travel through. Along the path are “stonegarlics” that symbolize the “manjusaka.” Finally, smoke and laser beams are used with precision to create an immersive realm for the audience, ingeniously embodying and overlapping “the other shore/the end in the afterlife” with the audience’s collective and first-person experience. Based on the concept of life and death in the Taiwanese folk culture of guiding the soul, this work gives a new interpretation to the dance topic of “the body in the world” while serving as a successful metaphor for achieving the possibility of transcending the boundary of life and death through the mind and imagination. (Commentator: LIN Yu-Shih)

Artwork Introduction

The Eternal Straight Line is a new production after two interdisciplinary technological works, Seventh Sense and Second Body. Integrated with the expression of technology, this new work continues the discussion about the changing definition of body prompted by technological intervention in Second Body, and explores as well as challenges the idea of “death ensues when the body perishes” to re-imagine the definition of death. In addition to collaborating again with technological art studio Ultra Combos and light design team We Do Group, the dance theatre also works for the first time with cloud designer Lin Shu-Yu. Combining the indefinite form of “smoke” and its semi-transparent, blurring quality with the coloring of theatrical light and image projection, the work produces illusory, dream-like scenes, leading the audience into an unknown realm to experience a dialectic journey about death and life.

About the Artist

Anarchy Dance Theatre
Founded in 2010, the Chinese name of the dance theatre is a phonetic translation of the English word, “anarchy.” With contemporary dance as its primary creative form, Anarchy Dance Theatre employs physical expression as a medium to perceive the external world, attempting to venture beyond the theatrical form to explore time, space, objects as well as the modern relationship between humans and society. The practice of the dance theatre blends theatre, dance technology and art installation, including pure dance choreographies that reflect on human relations as well as technology-based creations that explore philosophical thinking in the relationship between humans and technology.

HSIEH Chieh-Hua / Artistic Director of Anarchy Dance Theatre
Hsieh Chieh-Hua’s background in architecture and dance, along with his unique conceptualization of space and ingenious incorporation of technological elements, has contributed to his characteristic creative thinking, which introduces a more diversified expression and sensibility into dance performance and bodily senses. His interdisciplinary technological works include Seventh Sense (2011), Second Body (2015) and The Eternal Straight Line (2019), which have been featured in prominent international arts festivals. He was one of the directors for the opening ceremony of the 2017 Summer Universiade, and co-created the dance-installation series You Choreograph, which was done in collaboration with fellow choreographer Tung I-Fen and further pushed the boundaries of expression in dance beyond conventional “performance.”