Dance South-“#hashtag”,“Queer Metaverse”

“Dance South” is an international residency and exchange project organized by Kua Bo Dance Theatre in 2020, which is currently resident at the Chiayi Performing Arts Center and is an Outstanding Performing Arts Organization in Chiayi County. This program includes two solo dance pieces created by artists Chen, Yu-Chen and Chen, Gong-Wei, who participated in international exchanges at the Spanish dance platform, Certamen Coreográfico de Madrid, in Madrid, Spain, in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Dance South focuses on gender and female issues, exploring the similarities and differences in these perspectives through the performance of the two solo dance pieces. These performances reflect contemporary views on gender awareness in Taiwan.

⟢Pre-Show Introduction
5 minutes before each show starts
⟢ Post-Show Dialogue
09/06 (Fri) Naceku (“Dance South” Interned Producer)
09/07 (Sat) Su, Pin-Wen (“Dance South” International Producer)


“Queer Metaverse”

Artist｜Chen, Gong-Wei (WIN/they/them)
WIN is a lesbian artist, theater/film performer, feminist, queer,stranger, vegan... who believes the more tags a person has, the harder to define a person, and who believes the fluidity of multiple identities embodies personal politics.
Win concerns about gender, feminism, and lesbian culture and dedicates to the exploration of social behavior as practice.
Win’s creative concept seeks to combine personal context with social observations to reflect contemporary situations, and through performing arts, they focus on the unique characteristics and diversity of marginalized groups. Their Intention is to overturn the limitations and frameworks brought by mainstream society and break the stereotypes of heterosexual tradition.

Performance Introduction｜
Queer Metaverse reflects on queer and lesbian identities by using daily necessities such as plastic ropes, crocheting, clothes hangers, and cable ties to create artworks that transform the way these objects are normally used. These creations give birth to extraordinary forms, breaking free from the stereotypical body image which generates an elusive and peculiar sense of humor to focus on contemporary aspects of queer and lesbian culture, as well as body politics.
Through performing gender, they demonstrate the complexity of queer identities, while also showcasing the chaotic self and identity flow of queer female within Taiwanese culture.

⟢ “Queer Metaverse” Sound Design｜Tang, Yu-Lun


“#hashtag”

Artist｜Chen, Yu-Chen (They/Them)
Chen, Yu-Chen (They/them) graduated from the 7-Year Integrated Program in the Department of Dance at Taipei National University of the Arts, a member and choreographer of Kua Bo Dance Theatre. They start dancing at the age of five and specialize in modern and contemporary dance as their preferred forms of artistic expression.
Yu-Chen currently concentrates on gender, bodily autonomy, and queer community topics. Attempting to explore social phenomena between self and community from long-term dance training and personal bodily experiences, constructing a dance-specific body language to investigate hidden gender issues.

Performance Introduction｜
Birth—Sex—Name, tapping piece by piece, is the decoration on your body.
Tensions—Twists—Attrition, falling piece by piece, only takes a minute to stay or leave.
Connecting to the experience of being a woman, the work focuses on how people are gradually being labeled, how people are shaped by traditional Taiwanese gender stereotypes, and how people want to escape from the frame desperately. The artist is going to reconstruct the physical and mental expression by attaching and removing the tags in #hashtag.