April 13, 2014
Amber Kao: Mirrors of Time
- Research & Reflections - An online journal of Fulbright Taiwan experiences (Amber Kao)
...My collaborative work with Professor Yen began within weeks of my arrival in Taiwan. This allowed me to capture raw and unfiltered thoughts about the new journey I was about to embark upon this year. This work, titled Mirrors of Time, references the reflective process that occurs when one travels and lives abroad. For me, this work stands to flag the beginning of a something new: a new chapter, new lessons, and new experiences and questions to challenge what I know. With all the excitement and transitions after my arrival in Taipei, I felt the need to begin on familiar grounds for this work. Therefore, I chose to take movements from a solo I created in the States for a project set to J.S. Bach’s first violin partita. My training in music and dance thus far has been based around Western traditions and I felt “at home” dancing these movements. I rearranged the sequence of dance movements from the original solo in order to correspond with the structure of Professor Yen’s new composition for this collaboration. As I restructured the sequence, the movements began to presume a new life of their own. This choreographic process of using known material and reconstructing it into something new reflects the beginning of re-defining my identity....