A long-abandoned ancestral home is crowded with old furniture and strewn with objects of daily life, as if frozen in time. It stands vacant due to an unresolved inheritance dispute and serves as a metaphor both for the thorny relations of a large family with competing claims on the family legacy and for Taiwan’s current political situation, rife with complexity and difficult to explain.

Meditating on this symbolic connection helped launch Lo Fang-yun’s artistic journey. When she arrived in Germany 14 years ago, she was a stranger from a distant island nation with a complicated history and political situation. She spent a good deal of time and effort trying to explain who she was and where she came from. As a result, she began to think more about her own identity, and discovered a remarkable similarity between the insuperable problems within her own family and the difficulties facing her country.

Taking her own experience as a starting point, she used her artistic vision to create a dance composition both profound and sublime. The work reflects the humanism that shaped her intellectual development in Europe. In the performance, she explores the origins of various conflicts and contradictions while trying to answer the profound question, “Who am I?” For the title of the piece, which focuses on the question of identity, Lo chose Unsolved.

Her extensive involvement with European performing arts circles has resulted in frequent collaborations between Lo Fang-yun and European artists, and frequent opportunities for cultural exchange.

A serendipitous meeting

Unsolved is slated to open in September in Essen, Germany, and then move to Taiwan in November. It is intended to be the first of a series investigating questions of identity.

Lo chose the name Polymer DMT for her collaborative dance endeavor because ju­hewu, the Chinese for “polymer,” sounds the same as three characters that mean “collaborative dance performance.” It also captures the idea of different parts working together, or in this case the combination of people with different professional specialties and different cultural backgrounds. Unsolved is the result of close collaboration between Lo, who serves as both stage director and choreo­grapher, and Chen ­Cheng-ting, who serves as set designer. Both are from Taiwan and both are veterans of Germany’s performing arts world. Moreover the duo shares a strong sense of Taiwanese identity.

They first got to know each other in 2016. Earlier they had each worked on various projects that had allowed them to become familiar with the performing arts world in Europe and to gain experience and develop their creative aptitudes, as well as exploring their respective strengths in the performing arts and their expectations for the theater. In search of a set designer for Luceo, a dance theater production for children, Lo placed an ad on the Internet, and when Chen answered the two immediately hit it off.

“When I met Fang-yun, I discovered that we had worked on similar performances in the past and wanted to say similar things through our work,” Chen says. “As a team we can now put that into practice.”

Chen Cheng-ting was drawn to the aesthetics and humanistic approach of the performing arts in Germany, which can be contrasted with the commercialism of American theater. (courtesy of Lafun Photography, photo by James Lin)

Dance without borders

In addition to the central theme of their collaboration in Unsolved, Lo and Chen have decided to focus on an exploration of identity. The production itself will be a transnational affair with performances in Taiwan and Germany. For Lo this seemed like a natural choice. “When we talk about identity we first turn to our own experiences,” she says, “so for our first production we used Taiwan as the setting.”

“Given our identities, we couldn’t explore the question of identity and development in a German setting,” Lo emphasizes. “We had to return to our roots.”

Unsolved had the good fortune of receiving financial support both from the international arts venue Pact Zollverein in Essen, and from the National Culture and Arts Foundation Taiwan in the form of a Performing Arts Abroad grant, intended to promote the international development of Taiwan’s performing arts. Beyond this financial support, the production also gained access to performance spaces and technical personnel. Because the piece will be performed in both countries, the staff has been able to travel back and forth for fieldwork and rehearsals.

Just as studying abroad gave Luo and Chen the opportunity to see things from a different perspective, the production company is bringing layers of complexity to the subject matter through the diversity of professional knowledge and personal experiences. Aside from Lo and Chen, the company includes Taiwanese dancer ­Chung Chih-wen, German video designer Hanna Linn Ernst, and Swiss musician Patrik Zosso, among others. They have been able to add a broader significance to Lo’s personal experience, transforming it into a work of universal artistic value that examines the complex nature of identity like peeling away the layers of an ­onion, moving toward the truth at the center.    

During the production of Unsolved, the performers took fieldtrips to Taiwan.

Theater creating dialogue

Aside from exploring identity issues, Lo hopes that this coproduction with Germany can provide Taiwan with a useful model and that the more advanced professional practices of German performing arts will rub off on Taiwan’s performing arts circles. 

In Germany’s numerous theaters, small and medium­-sized troupes are constantly innovating. Seeking out independent artists and troupes to perform in coproductions and supporting them from creation to production has become a trend in theater circles. 

This approach, which is similar to many of Taiwan’s artist-in-residence programs, can effectively encourage creativity and ensure that artistic creations are closely connected to local culture. In the past Taiwan’s National Theater and Concert Hall often booked foreign productions that were presented just as they had been in their home countries, leaving both the performers and the audience wondering about the relevance to local culture. “Now that more artists live abroad, they have begun to understand how creative work is informed by different cultural backgrounds,” Chen says. “As we explore the themes and context of our own creative endeavors and the conversations we want to have, coproductions help create that dialogue.”

Stefan Hilterhaus, artistic director at Pact Zoll­ver­ein, is particularly fond of Lo’s ability to synthesize elements of Taiwanese and European culture. “Lo Fang-yun’s work is essentially inspired by both Western and Asian cultures. Her work fuses and unfolds different backgrounds, narratives and concepts on many levels,” Hilterhaus says. “She combines different materials and mediums in her artistic works with an originality that appeals to me.”

Pact Zollverein has therefore been working on co­productions with Lo since 2017.

Pact Zollverein is a performing arts space and a platform for artistic exchange and creative exploration. (photo by Dirk Rose, courtesy of Pact Zollverein)

Coming full circle

Lo points out that German theater has masters of modern dance, such as Pina Bausch, and that it is celebrated for providing comprehensive job security and social services for performing artists, including a professional union and insurance. Whether accepting a salaried job or working freelance, performing artists enjoy a guaranteed minimum salary, and both the government and private-sector organizations help ensure that these protections are enforced. Perhaps this is due to Ger­many’s embrace of humanism, and it certainly gives Taiwan something to ponder over.

“The art scene in Taiwan often gives the impression that the artist must sacrifice for their art, even if they are saddled with debts, but these are unrealistic expectations,” Chen says frankly. “The German experience shows us that this is a profession and that artists need to be rewarded for their creations.”

Thus staging Unsolved as an international coproduction has a dual purpose: to explore identity and to solve technical production problems. “We are convinced that art possesses an enormous aptitude to deal fruitfully with the many contradictions in our present reality, and can do much that the mechanics of some other systems are not capable of,” Stefan Hilterhaus says.

The production is a journey into the metaphysical questions of life and the practical means of bringing such a production to life.                                                           

Polymer DMT’s first German–Taiwanese coproduction was Luceo, a children’s dance performance, which received financial support from the 2017 Taipei Children’s Arts Festival and Pact Zollverein. (photo by Tanya Hofmann)

Stefan Hilterhaus, artistic director at Pact Zollverein, helped found the German performing arts space. (photo by Julia Reschucha, courtesy of Pact Zollverein)

Lo Fang-yun (front row, center) and Chen Cheng-ting (front row, right) share a deep sense of cultural identity. They are applying their experiences from Germany to performing arts circles in Taiwan.