Reintegrating song and dance
Tjimur Dance Theatre defines itself as an heir to traditional culture. All dance students in Taiwan will have studied ballet, but ballet is after all a product of Western culture. Because Asian ballet dancers tend to have a smaller physique, they often lose ground to their Western peers. If Cloud Gate has drawn on Tai Chi to create modern dances with an Eastern flavor, where should Tjimur, as an indigenous troupe, look to find its own point of reference?
For Ljuzem, traditional culture provides the answer.
In traditional Paiwan culture, dance and song are inseparably linked: songs feed into, and also arise from, dances. Just as the ancient ballads are gradually being lost to the process of modernization, so traditional dances are disappearing too.
Recovering Paiwan culture’s traditional body language requires an immersive approach that reintegrates song and dance into the very fabric of life. This is why Ljuzem insisted on establishing Tjimur’s headquarters in Sandimen and asks her dancers to learn from the locals. Only through living in the locality can one gain an intimate knowledge of Paiwan culture.
Most of the training received by dance students today is heavily influenced by the West. But postures such as leg extensions and pointe work rarely appear in traditional Paiwan dances. The rhythmicity of the classic four-step dance, for example, relies on forward, backward and sideways movements with knees bent. This body language is significantly different from what most people are familiar with from ballet.
“This movement appears easy, but not many professionally trained students can do it.” Ljuzem explains: “This is not ‘squatting’, but ‘sinking.’” If the beauty of ballet rests on a slender, elongated elegance, then Paiwan dances exude a plainer, more vigorous sense of beauty.
A dance graduate herself, Ljuzem has developed a systematic didactic method to train her dancers. All dancers at Tjimur, be they Paiwan or not, have to start from scratch and learn traditional Paiwan ballads.