In the past two days I've seen two shows in the Taiwan season that seem to be in conversation with each other, so I've reviewed them together.
Image description: A visual representation of the two shows: Palingenesis has stickmen embracing tightly sitting one behind the other with their legs and arms around each other, and also an evil face with a tongue sticking out and lots of circles round it. And then Lost Connection has people looking at phones, two faces looking directly at one another, and a face with a phone in the back of it. All very disjointed.
Two contemporary dance pieces in the Taiwan Season explore the pain and difficulty of forming relationship with others - Lost Connection by Seed Dance Company, and Palingenesis by D-Antidote Production.
Humans are inherently social animals - we need physical and emotional connection. Nowadays, loneliness and isolation are endemic; since 2018, the UK government has had a Minister for Loneliness. The Ministry runs campaigns each year backed by tens of millions of pounds to tackle the stigma of loneliness, providing mental health support and resources to encourage people to connect to their local community. With the way people use technology, the government's research shows that 16 to 24 year olds are "the loneliest age group and are also the least likely to take action to help themselves".
Seed Dance Company, headed by ingenious choreographer and performer Wen-Jen Huang, digs into the pain of phone addiction. The show is full of purposefully missed opportunities for human interaction. Performers shake and jolt, pull each other's clothes, take selfies with eerie Kawaii grins and fall flat on the floor in the struggle to reach each other. Their social skills seem stunted. With flat coloured clothing, grey-purple hair and pale, faces with large bags under their eyes, they look like walking zombies or androids, endlessly staring at the small lights they hold in their hands.
Both shows play with shadows and half-lights, pulling characters in and out of focus. In Palingenesis, a dance trio wear skin-coloured alien-like masks that cover their entire faces including their mouth, nose and eyes. When the lights are dim, it's difficult to tell who is who as they weave in and out of each other's space.
If Lost Connection is about isolation, Palingenesis is the total opposite. The performers seem to be constantly intertwined with one another. The line between the individual and the group is blurred. Both performance use acrobatics, lifts, turns and tumbles, and the performers' physical closeness sits in contrast to the disconnect between the characters.
The trio of Palingenesis form a kind of hybrid creature, often moving together like a huge insect with three heads, tumbling around and around each other in repetitive motion. There is a sense of co-dependency between them. They break apart for one short scene in the piece - a rare moment of freedom, slowness, and breath - but it cannot last. They are drawn back together like magnets.
Lost Connection has a similar moment of freedom for the characters, but in the opposite way to Palingenesis. After repetitively failing to come together, one scene shows the characters attempting to grasp intimacy of connection with each other. They appear to see each other for a second, but don't quite manage to maintain the grasp. The poignancy and tragedy of "what nearly was" made me cry.
After Lost Connection, I found it really hard to write this review. I didn't want to look at a screen. I chatted to the people around me at the theatre, about the Fringe, about life. And I drew the silly picture above. It's weird to think how fine the line is between connection and loneliness, between dependency and freedom. We are always searching for the balance, but often seem to miss.
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