Three days in Wanhua, day 1: Want to Dance Festival 2025

Various Venues, Taipei
April 11, 2025

Three days in Wanhua, day 2
Three days in Wanhua, day 3

Curated by Shinehouse Theatre (曉劇場) artistic director Chung Po-yuan (鍾伯淵), alongside advisors Keng Yi-wei (耿一偉), chief dramaturg of National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts-Weiwuying, and independent producer Chang Xin-yi (張欣怡, Gwen), the 2025 Want to Dance Festival (艋舺國際舞蹈節) featured an impressive 75 performances of 43 works across 16 spaces and venues. It was a fine three days in every sense, after several rainy weekends, the good weather a bonus that ensured all the outdoor performances went ahead as planned.

Apart from Shinehouse’s own Wan Theater (萬座曉劇場), a converted sugar warehouse at the Tanbu Cultural Park (糖廍文化園), and other spaces, the festival continued its policy of making dance accessible by taking it to unusual and public locations, this year including historic sites and parks, a children’s playground, markets, and even a busy traffic intersection.

Known in Chinese as the Monga International Dance Festival, it all takes place in what used to be called Monga, now Wanhua, one of oldest districts in Taipei, and one with a rich cultural and historical heritage, even if it is not the first area of the city that comes to mind when one thinks of contemporary theatre.

At the Wan Theater, in two quintuple-bills, the Exchange Program presented seven works by local choreographers along with collaborations with Laos’ FMK (Fang Mae Khong) International Dance Festival and South Korea’s Busan International Dance Market. In the same venue, Wan Focus featured performances from Lithuania and Germany. Elsewhere, the Open Call Program saw 29 works performed by groups from Italy, Spain, Australia, Mexico, and Taiwan, some full-blown pieces, some more sketches.

The Want to Dance Festival has always been about pushing boundaries. The overall 2025 theme was ‘Diversity,’ the wide range of works presented tackling various issues including culture, ethnicity and gender. But, “Diversity does not mean we are different,” Chung stressed at the opening ceremony. “It means we are the same because we have the freedom to create.”

This year’s opening performance saw Chara Kotsali from Athens to present to be possessed, a solo that aims to reveal the voices of `possessed` women in a sort of dance séance in which she is not only the medium, but also DJ. It’s an interesting idea, full of good intent, but sadly only occasionally realised.

The audience is presented with a board on which Kotsali pastes bits of poster to form a collage of people possessed by spirits, and three pedestals on which sit bowl of paste, a bugle, used sparingly and to little effect, and a sound deck that provides a thumping accompaniment. And a sack, which we later discover contains straw, spread in a ceremonial circle that remains unused.

As she calls on the spirits and engages in trial possessions, she attempts to bring each to life. She becomes the mouthpiece for their stories, although the lip-synching was not always totally persuasive.

Her movement is more compelling. It does sometimes appear that Kotsali’s body has indeed been temporarily possessed and animated by the spirits she’s contacting. Limbs contort as she jerks, convulses and thrashes about in between moments that suggest a hip-hop or street influence. But it does get repetitive and time slows.

The most disturbing moment comes just before the end, when Kotsali produces a long black tape from her mouth. The frantic movement and flashing lights of the conclusion feel more like a rave than a séance, however. And while you can argue that being a raver is a form of being possessed, it didn’t convince.

Moving along to the Tanbu Cultural Park’s intimate Warehouse A, Island (一嶼), a work-in-progress by Chien Lin-yi (簡麟懿) could hardly have been more different.

An experimental work developed during his studies at the Taipei National University of the Arts, the piece reflects Taiwan’s small size and high population density; a place where “people are expected to maintain close and sticky relationships,” as he puts it. Further inspiration came from the Chinese character for ‘person’ (人), in which one stroke is slightly tilted, the other providing support.

And that is precisely what Chien, and dancers Yeh An-ting (葉安婷) and Wang Cian-yi (汪芊懿) presented in a superb twenty minutes of spellbinding dance. The pair inhabit a place of delicate balance, Wang in particular leaning and supporting on her partner in myriad ways.

The timing and partnering was top notch, everything coming with strength but also subtle tenderness. A tricky moment comes when Yeh removes Wang’s T-shirt, pulling it off so carefully, only to replace it moments later, but it didn’t look at all contrived and was, again, all so smoothly. There were some gorgeous shapes too, Wang leaning back as Yeh holds her behind her knees just one such. But it wasn’t only about movement, it was very easy to read a relationship into everything. It really was quite sublime. Chien is clearly ‘one to watch.’

At the Haujiang House Overpass at the busy intersection of Heping West Road and Huanhe South Road, probably the festival’s most unusual venue, Huang Chih-Chia (黃至嘉) presented MARY 李 (瑪麗 LI), a work inspired by her time in London as a MA student at Central Saint Martins.

Huang’s theatre directing and performance design background are to the fore in a work in which she focuses on the multicultural nature of contemporary society, and experiments with personal expression, communication and understanding across cultures. Included in that are questions of just how deeply rooted our native culture might be in our bodies and minds as we travel and experience other places, whether it might still be the core of our identity that defines us, and to what extent we fear losing that identity.

Dressed in striking red with a black coat, Huang cut quite a figure on the central reservation, certainly attracting the attention of passers-by motorists stopped at the traffic lights. But while the work certainly carries the suggestion of someone trying to tread the path between two cultures, it overall struggled to deliver its message. Matters were not helped by it being very difficult to hear the soundtrack over the traffic, especially what was probably important text.

Three days in Wanhua, day 2
Three days in Wanhua, day 3