Taiwan Academy of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles partners with Western Arts Alliance (WAA) to present six webinars titled as “THE NEXT STAGE: Essential Issues in Performing Arts Creation, Presentation, and Engagement” in 2021. The first webinar, “Creation in Isolation - Adversity Meets Innovation”, will be held at 4:00 pm PST on April 26. Cheng Tsung-lung (Artistic Director, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan), Farooq Chaudhry (Executive Producer, Akram Khan Company), and Aditya Prakash (Artist, Aditya Prakash Ensemble) will be invited to talk with moderator Chris Lorway (Executive Director, Stanford Live) through Zoom while simultaneously livestreaming on WAA’s YouTube channel and Facebook. Welcome to watch at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iQGcO3Z6JQ.
The pandemic has forever changed our world, the arts included. While facing the border closure and quarantine, artists have taken on the challenges to evolve their practice of creation, collaboration, performance, and engagement. Three speakers in this panel will share their journeys about how adversity inspired more creativity. The U.S. tour of “13 Tongues” by Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan was postponed due to the pandemic. Through broadcasting the video series of “Behind-the-Scenes: Creation of 13 Tongues”, the audiences can know more about the creation elements and Taiwan culture represented in “13 Tongues” before watching it in theaters. Released in December 2020, “The Animal Kingdom Project” was an initiation between multimedia dance platform “Numeridanse” and Akram Khan Company. To explore the human connection to the natural world, this project gathered numerous videos that people embodied animals through dance. Aditya Prakash, Los Angeles based vocalist, has been collaborating with musicians virtually from multiple locations during the pandemic. Moderator Chris Lorway, Executive Director of Stanford Live since 2016, was the founding artistic director of Toronto’s internationally recognized Luminato Festival.
WAA was established in 1967 and its members are mainly performing arts professionals such as artists, managers, agents, and presenters from throughout the Western U.S. Each year, the WAA annual conference takes place in August. “The Next Stage” webinar series will be held from April to November 2021, gathering artists and arts leaders in the U.S. and Taiwan to explore the possibilities of performing arts in the coming post-pandemic age. It will spotlight diverse topics, such as performance creation, cross-genre collaborations, venue innovation, and technology application. For more information, please visit https://www.westarts.org/.