Perfect Improvisation

Forging exciting connections

Blindfolded with a strip of red cloth and holding a flywhisk, Ku Ming-shen whirls on her bare feet. The elegant lines of her figure rest against a heavy wood frame. With her head tilted, she intones phrases from the Chinese classic “Worldly Longings.” On the other side of the stage, Lee Hsiao-ping, looking dismayed, springs into action, dashing forward like a gust of wind, but ignoring Ku completely. For an instant he brushes past her, but they resemble two meteors traveling on parallel paths, which never meet. “Doppler Effect is a new form of performance that director Lee Hsiao-ping and I spent three years developing and refining.” Ku and Lee, both National Award for Arts winners, have joined forces, combining their expertise in dance and in theater to achieve a new masterpiece.

“You can seamlessly combine dance with other arts.” A dancer like Ku not only knows how to use her physical movements to enchant her audience but is also capable of channeling her own deep thoughts and insights.

“Dance seems to come to me by instinct.” Ku is a professionally trained dancer. She attended Taipei Hwa Kang Arts School, which at that time was the only secondary school in Northern Taiwan that offered a dance program, and then studied at Chinese Culture University, the only higher edu­cation institution in Taiwan with a dance depart­ment. She pursued further studies abroad twice before returning to Taiwan to teach. She was inspired by her mentors to focus on improvisation and contact improvisation, devoting herself to exploring the infinite complexity of the language of the body. She has never looked back.

Members of Ku & Dancers doing warm-up exercises through contact improvisation.

Your body never lies

“Actually most dancers think with their bodies,” Ku says. They interact with their environments directly through their senses. “When I was five, what confused me most was that I didn’t understand what ‘I’ meant.” Even at such a tender age, Ku was already wondering why we couldn’t directly experience each other’s sensations and feelings.

“Not until I started to learn about contact improvisation did I truly realize that it was actually possible to have connections and interactions between people.” Ku recalls her first experience of contact improvisation at the American Dance Festival in 1988. “It was an invisible, soul-grabbing energy,” just like the wonderful workings of the universe, which never pause and never come to an end. “The distance between body and mind turned out to be infinitesimal.” Two years after the festival Ku was still tingling with this memory, which had become indelibly intertwined with her physical being, and she traveled to the US again to pursue that astonishing energy.

“My entire understanding of dance revolves around the sensation of movements.” Inside the dance studio, many of the members of Ku & ­Dancers, who are all highly educated, are doing warm-up exercises in pairs, trying to sense the physical condition of their partners through contact impro­visa­tion. “Back then, contact improvisation was not mainstream, but today it is a required element in dance training.” The dancers’ bodies are entwined, manifesting a close mental connection that takes a long time to form. Thoroughly relaxed and without any restraint, they deliberately go off balance and fall, only for their partners to catch them smoothly—a process based on mutual trust and responsibility. Through a profound physical dialogue, messages—like an invisible cord that binds together the dancers and enables them to feel for each other—are conveyed between them, uninterrupted and unmediated.

Members of Ku & Dancers doing warm-up exercises through contact improvisation.

Learning from pain

At age 20, Ku joined the Chinese Youth Goodwill Mission and went to the US for the first time. Faced with the tremendous differences between American and Taiwanese education, she felt at a loss and soon began to skip classes. She often found herself crying alone.

Having neglected her studies for nearly a year, Ku went back to her classes when spring returned. But then a serious problem presented itself: she now had to struggle with basic movements that she had been able to perform effortlessly before. “My muscles had become hopelessly weak, and my limbs were very stiff.” By the end of the class, Ku found herself sweating profusely. The floor was wet, and she was on the brink of collapse. But engaging with her own body in this arduous manner helped her emerge from her dark mood and recover her cheerfulness.

“I really like to dance.” Having regained her mental peace, Ku realized that humans are born with the ability to dance, and that moving our limbs rhythmically is enough to make us happy. If we further explore the hows, whys, and whats, we will find that dance can be a rewarding lifelong pursuit.

Injuries are something that every dancer has to learn to cope with, and they often happen when least expected. Ku tells us that she once arrived at a rehearsal late. Flustered, she began to dance straight away without doing warm-ups. When she suddenly heard a soft popping sound, she knew she was in trouble. The pain grew gradually during the rehearsal and became unbearably intense. Ku insisted on carrying on with her performance, summoning up all her strength to overcome the pain. Behind her glorious per­formance on stage was a gritty spirit taxed to the limit.

“The story took an amazing turn.” During her last dance in a performance with a Dutch colleague, she heard that popping sound again. “I thought I probably wouldn’t be able to move the following day.” But she slept soundly throughout the night. When she woke up, she stretched her limbs carefully on her bed. There was no pain at all, and it no longer felt difficult to move. “It turned out that at that very instant, my muscles and tendons—exercised correctly—fell back into place.”

Ku and Lee Hsiao-ping—both National Award for Arts winners—have joined forces, spending three years creating Doppler Effect.

Ever excelling

Ku’s productions, which include both indoor and outdoor performances, have witnessed her company’s growth over the past 28 years, from I Was a Choreographer (1992) to Decoding (1999), Voltar (2012), Decode (2010), and The Gaze of Yi-Xi-Wei (2018). Ku says that contact impro­visa­tion is an ephemeral art; no performance can be exactly replicated. This type of dance fully embodies the marvelous nature of performance art. “Music is a very important element.” The dancers’ leaps and halts are all improvised to the music. There is no fixed rule that stipulates movement or stasis. Everything relies upon a sense of sympathetic understanding between the dancers.

“View Hunting [1998, 2001, 2017, 2020] was an outdoor production.” From selecting the venues to setting up the equipment, every task required a lot of exertion. The staff had to work together to put in place a metal frame weighing as much as 300 kilograms. Because each performance of View Hunting began at dusk and lasted until after sunset, they “had to accurately calculate when the sun would set, and at what angle,” in order to facilitate the transition from natural light to artificial lighting. The lawns where the performances were held looked smooth, but they often contained gravel and even hidden holes.

Ku & Dancers organized “i·dance Taipei” for the first time in 2011. Taking place every other year, this is a ­festival devoted to dance improvisation. The year 2021 will see the sixth festival. Offering a series of workshops that combine theory and practice, i·dance Taipei has thus far collaborated with dancers from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan to break new ground in improvisational dance.

In Doppler Effect, Ku, blindfolded with a strip of red cloth and holding a flywhisk, crosses the boundaries between real and imagined worlds.

No compromise

“You just have to keep dancing. You need to build and maintain muscle memory.” Only through constant practice can dancers continue to hone their craft. “Working with your body gives you so much happiness.” Ku practices every day. In recent years, she has even added weight training to her routine in order to boost her stamina.

For Ku, dance is inherently linked to her outlook on life. An enthusiast, she is always learning, putting ideas into practice, and pushing her body to new limits. It’s just like contact improvisation: there’s a logic that connects all active and passive movements, leading one movement to the next. And yet the appearance of spontaneity is not possible without the most robust training.

A meaningful life consists in respecting your own choices of how to live and what to do. “I choose to do what I love, and I love to do what I have chosen.” Ku Ming-shen, now an eminent dancer enjoying inter­national acclaim, is as unassuming and open-minded as ever. “I only wish to devote my life to dance, and cherish every dancing moment.”                                           

In 2006 Ku & Dancers presented Memory Puzzles, a dance which explores humanity’s desperate desire to hold onto evanescent memories. (courtesy of Ku & Dancers)

A highly productive creative roundtable at the 2019 edition of i·dance Taipei. (courtesy of Ku & Dancers)

The open-air dance View Hunting marked the first time Ku & Dancers had worked with nature in a structured improvisation. (courtesy of Ku & Dancers)

courtesy of Ku & Dancers