Bulareyaung Dance Company

Everyone is a unique one, but also a zero that is in harmony with the universe. 

In tianen tianmen Episode 1 produced by the Bulareyaung Dance Company, Choreographer Bulareyaung Pagarlava invites ABAO, a Paiwan singer and songwriter, to generate musical currents, and reretan pavavaljung, a Paiwan visual artist, to create visual ripples. With them leading the way, let us follow the dancers and leap into the electronic generation composed of zeros and ones. 

“This time, I would like to ask the young hands of Paiwan to help us point out a new world that has never been seen before,” said Bulareyaung. Bulareyaung rebelled against his regular creation process, allowing fervent young Paiwan artists to lead the way. They reach out their hands to point, stroke, and touch, experiencing a lively new world without bounds wherever they go. “Our forces converge like a river, and rush towards that direction,” said reretan. 

Proficient in transforming ancient folk songs into electronic music, ABAO tailor-made an acoustic party for the whole dance piece, liberating our auditory senses with free-spirited, language-transcending music. Projection designer Hsu Yi-chun, a long-term collaborator of the Company, transformed powerful images created by reretan for dancers to interact with and immerse themselves in, generating a visual effect of such sublime vibrance that it eventually became another brilliant performer of its own onstage. This is a piece in which artists join hands to entice dancers to leap into the flow and release the infinite momentum exclusive to their utmost restless youth. 

Newborn souls are aflame with fearless fervor. Tradition all of a sudden underwent too much reform, and could only be expressed through pointing. Look! That is the world they created, and you are part of it. 

What Bulareyaung Pagarlava said about tiaen tiamen Episode 1

No encounter is a coincidence. Each and every one of them is meant to be in life. 

tiaen tiamen is a phrase in Paiwan, an indigenous language in Taiwan. It means “me and us”. This is a piece that focuses on the Paiwan tribe and a challenge that I gave myself back in 2018. I deliberately set up this plan to half force myself to really examine my own tribal identity. But life has its own way, and you don’t always get to do what you want to do. Life has assigned me other challenges since then, and so I did not have a chance to tackle the theme. Maybe it was not time yet. 

In 2016, ABAO, a Paiwan singer and songwriter, released her first all-Paiwan album vavayan.Women. It took my breath away. The design of the album cover and the inside was also impressive. ABAO said to me, “You have to know this guy. He is brilliant!” reretan pavavaljung is a 23-year-old young Paiwan artist. He continued the Paiwan tradition of using patterns and chants to document life and culture due to lack of a writing system, and integrated the song names and what was described in the lyrics into the unique ancient patterns of Paiwan. In 2019, ABAO published another Paiwan album kinakaian Mother Tongue, which swept even more people away, and won a grand Golden Melody Award. I was once again fascinated by the design of the album cover by reretan. “ABAO, hurry! Introduce me to him. I want to know this guy!” The collaboration among the three of us was thus meant to be. 

pulima (youth), puqulu (middle age), and puvarung (old age) are the main core of the Paiwan Trilogy. They represent the Paiwan interpretation of the three stages of life, which reretan shared with me when we first met in 2021. We first start off with our hands of youth, move on to a stage during which we gain wisdom, and finally we set off from our heart to venture beyond. tiaen tiamen is the first episode. It starts off as pulima. Here we take it as the stage of youth, a stage at which we begin to self explore. reretan uses his dexterous hands to depict the universe of Paiwan. Led by ABAO’s psychedelic electronic music, the imagination of the dancers towards their bodies is ignited. One starts from oneself, allowing our souls to collide. 

In 2023, tiaen tiamen Episode 1 is finally to be presented. By then reretan will be thirty, ABAO will be forty, and I will be fifty. Our encounter was at different stages of our lives, but we appreciate and learn from one another. And to have Keith Lin, who has one-eighth of Paiwan blood, to also join the team as a costume designer makes me wonder whether everything is, in fact, really meant to be. 

2023/3/24-26 National Taichung Theater, Taichung, Taiwan
2023/4/14-16 Naitonal Theater, Taipei, Taiwan
2023/10/19-21 OzAsia Festival, Adelaide, Australia
2023/11/3-4 Taitung Art and Culture Center, Taitung, Taiwan
2023/12/9 Chiayi City Concert Hall, Chiayi City, Taiwan 
2024/10/10-12 Chaillot - Théâtre national de la Danse, France

OzAsia review: tiaen tiamen Episode 1
Dance review: tiaen tiamen Episode 1, Dunstan Playhouse