Dancing in the Little Manila

Jinwanwan Department Store, located on Zhongshan North Road, is connected with St. Christopher Church all the way to the north. Along the street, there are different Southeast Asian convenience stores and vendors, so the place is known as Little Manila in Taipei. The place operates regularly, only on Sundays, being in halt from Monday to Saturday, just like the orchid cacti that blossom only in one night. The blossom cycle is week-based. In the past, Jinwanwan was a mall that sold imported products; the place eventually went to declination and was hit by a fire. This old place with cheap store rents attracted the Filipino community in Taiwan. Compared to St. Christopher Church, a religious belief center, Jinwanwan has become the site for entertainment and life. In the double-rectangle-shaped structure, the mall was filled with mostly hairdressing, manicure, and food shops. When Sunday comes, it will revive with all the commotions. One can see crowds of people outside almost every shop.

In fact, apart from the stores of the Filipinos, Taiwanese stores are mixed in between Jinwanwan. They are next to each other yet not very connected. Taiwanese stores are quite tranquil, while Filipino stores are more boisterous. Taiwanese people are in motion behind the glass door of the store, while Filipinos are overflown to the outside. The connections and linkages of each other in Jinwanwan have formed a market-like network with emotional relationships. In other words, the separation of walls and glass are just in form. The truly decisive factor of the connection is the emotional language between people – the ability and willingness to comprehend each other. As we stationed in Store No. 163 in Jinwanwan, we had to learn their rules and syntax so that we didn't become the ones asking with wishful intention but rather having an egalitarian dialogue with the community. The team of“Not Just Love Stories” was facing this kind of issue.

At the early stationing, we were treated as foreigners – a period of inevitable acclimatization. The rented space would not attract anybody, and no one understood the content of our project. Conducting this experiment week after week, all of us tried to live with the biological clock of Little Manila where the stores were open only on Sundays. As we walked out of the glass window of No. 163, we tried to conduct interviews with the camera, flowers, and flyers within the building. The artists’ energy supplied an enormous force of advancement, and the shop window was the anchoring point. We all swarm hard outwardly to the ocean in Jinwanwan. The two-month overlapping resulted in a sense of familiarity. More and more notes appeared on the shop window. Our Filipino friends started to remember our figures. They would not back off as we approached. It became a time and space of sharing, sharing mostly love, the most intimate hand gesture. Shop No. 163 used flowers as an invitation, an object of initiation without the need of using a language, paving a flower path towards the relationship network. The space in Jinwanwan had never changed, yet the space of Store No. 163 was expanded. In the name of love, we had become part of the market. 

When the concepts of space and place are brought into conversations, we often mention David Simon’s “body-ballet” which is to liken the body movement of a single individual to a dance. After some time, it will become a "space routine", and several of it will form a "place-ballet", attributing it a space meaning which is the source of the place sensation. It is a very poetic metaphor, particularly the sense of body placed in the space of Jinwanwan - fascinating! On Sundays, when everybody was away from their jobs, the light of the stage in Little Manila was on. With life in a foreign country as the rhythm, Migrant workers sang and danced freely for one day. The spaces within the two-story Jinwanwan gathered moving bodies with different auras so that all emotions, such as dependence, nostalgia, comfort, longing, and admiration, had support and a place of belonging. It is a cycle of performance year after year, as well as a remake of the homeland after crossing the ocean. It might look different, but the essence is of the same exquisiteness. When the team of “Not Just Love Stories” walked along the double-rectangle corridor, it would see the attractive dances. We couldn’t help but also tiptoed within the misdirection as we spinned along with the background music – not an easy process yet priceless. 

The past prosperity within Jinwanwan did not vanish; it is condensed. Even without imported goods, they are just replaced with other objects that would touch our hearts. With the dances of new dancers, the spaces were taken into distinctive daily trajectories, forming strong emotional images. Every jump and landing would arouse a sensation in the heart. Every Sunday, when the curtain is pulled apart, the crowd is invited to come in. It was so fortunate for the team “Not Just Love Stories” to join the dance which was the sweetest experience and memories of our stationing in this space.