Posted: May 13th, 2018 | Author: Caterina Albano | Filed under: Performance | Tags: Chou Tung-yen, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Formosa, Huang Pei-hua, Lee Hwai-min, Very Mainstream Studio, Walis Nokan | Comments Off on Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Formosa at Sadler’s Wells
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Formosa, Sadler’s Wells, May 9
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre in Formosa (photo: HSU Ping)
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s new production Formosa, presented at Sadler’s Wells, is also the last work choreographed by its founder Lin Hwai-min who has announced he will retire as artistic director in 2019. From its avant-garde beginnings in the 1970s, the company has occupied a unique position in Taiwan and internationally, distinctively merging diverse artistic and cultural influences into an extensive repertoire of works in which local traditions, myths or history acquire contemporary significance.
In his work, Lin Hwai-min uses Taiwan as a source of inspiration to create imaginative microcosms that act as metaphors for the dynamics shaping geopolitics and societies more broadly. Such a correlation between micro- and macrocosm is also the underlying motif in this latest work, in which Taiwan itself is the protagonist (Ihla Formosa is the seventeenth century Portuguese name meaning ‘beautiful island’). Lin Hwai-min evokes its landscape of rice fields and oceans, rivers, valleys and towns through poetry, sound and movement that convey the expansive idea of cultures as ‘collective conditions of immersion in air, [water] and sign systems’. He achieves this synthesis by seamlessly imbuing the choreography with formal integrity and poetic vibrancy.
The empty stage is like a three-dimensional plane of infinite possibilities delineated only by white light as if we are peering into an open box. The twenty-four dancers in loose costumes of pale blues, greens and orange-browns are both the embodiment of place and lore, and of the Chinese ideograms that represent them. The initial white emptiness gradually fills with projected typefaces giving form to an intangible scenery by Chou Tung-yen and Very Mainstream Studio. It is like a world in the process of being created that resonates with a soundscape of music, found sounds and recorded readings. Words, as the programme notes suggest, are the starting point for Formosa. We use words to name and document, to represent and give meaning to the environments in which we live, but words can also become blurred over time as the stories we tell give way to new ones. It is this potential to convey meaning and the sensory qualities of resonance, rhythm and the graphic character of words to which the choreographic movement responds, shifting fluidly from floor rotations to elevation and arched extensions in a constant gathering and dissipation of form that at points isfrozen in temporary stillness. Like the shape of a Chinese ideogram that contains within its abstract form the concept and action it refers to, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s distinctive dance vocabulary conveys in gestures and steps both aerial lightness and earthy robustness: the rhythm of seasons, the swaying of grass and leaves or the flowing of streams, the tapping of feet resounding like rain and falling bodies dropping with the mighty weight of stones shattered by an earthquake.
The vibrant almost pastoral beginning teeming with activity and the unpredictable eruption of the elements acquires a more sinister quality in the second half of the performance. As we learn in an excerpt from Taiwanese poet Walis Nokan’s Pulling Back The Veil Of Silence, the flow of rivers is stopped by man’s fortifications: we see Huang Pei-hua as a solitary river increasingly surrounded by the menacing and aggressive clustering of the rest of the company. She dances her demise in what is a Sacre du Printempsfor our ecologically doomed times and the stage is increasingly filled with typefaces whose density makes them illegible: a collapse into incommunicability and violence. Fighting erupts and the dancers divide into two groups. Lin Hwai-min comments in the program notes, ‘There is a tradition of internal fighting on this island. But as I was working on the piece, I realised such conflict was everywhere. Taiwan is not unique… Look at what is happening everywhere. But I believe it has a universal appeal that is applicable to other countries.’ On stage, aggression and violence turn into disintegrating energies and a struggle for survival. The dancers fall to the floor; ideograms themselves fragment line by line until they dissolve into nothingness. Slowly one by one the dancers pull themselves up into a faltering motion that increasingly takes on the perpetual flow of waves that form and break, repeated in the concluding section by a film sequence of the ocean and a solitary figure who stands in a box of white light as at the beginning of the performance.
‘All things contrived are like a dream, illusion, bubble, shadow, and as a dewdrop or lightning. They should be regarded as such’, reads the Buddhist Diamond Sutra. Out of movement and light Formosacreates a world that is both dreamlike and illusionary, full of tumult and tenderness, a drop that contains an ever-changing ocean of possibilities.
Posted: May 12th, 2016 | Author: Nicholas Minns | Filed under: Performance | Tags: Cloudgate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Hermann Hesse, Ko Wan-chun, Lee Hwai-min, Lin Hsin-fang, Siddhartha, Songs of the Wanderers, Wang Rong-ji, Wang Wei-min | Comments Off on Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Songs of the Wanderers
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Songs of the Wanderers, Sadler’s Wells, May 7
The final pattern of Songs of the Wanderers (photo: Yu-Hui-hung)
A monk in white robes standing motionless on stage for seventy minutes under a steady stream of falling rice is a powerful image of stoicism, concentration, and meditative self-control. Wang Rong-ji’s presence in Cloud Gate’s Songs of the Wanderers is an indication not only of the spiritual nature of the work but counterintuitively of the quality of its movement. We don’t see him move until he re-enters the stage to take his bow but his modest gesture of outstretched arms to acknowledge the applause gives the impression of pure spirit, of a body that has no apparent weight or strength. It is a gesture that defines movement by its absence of physical intent and, in diverting attention away from the body, focuses on the spiritual aspect of being. This is central to Lin Hwai-min’s conception of Songs of the Wanderers, which he created following a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya in India where Shakyamuni Buddha attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree. As Lin Hwai-min describes, “I sat quietly under the bodhi tree, shoulder to shoulder with the monks. I opened my eyes, and saw sunlight coming from the top of the stupa through the branches to land directly on my forehead. My heart became full of joy; I felt a quietude that I had never experienced.”
Songs of the Wanderers is also inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a novel set in India about a young man who leaves home in search of enlightenment; the meandering river of golden rice we see on stage at the beginning of Songs of Wanderers suggests the river that both physically and metaphorically led Siddhartha from illusion to enlightenment.
The wanderers of Lin Hwai-min’s Songs emerge from behind the dark backcloth and drift towards the river with tall staffs cut from forest branches. The monk is on the opposite shore under the cascading rice: set designer Austin M.C. Wang has thus created two rivers, one vertical and one horizontal. In Hesse’s novel Siddhartha annihilates the contradictions in words and thoughts, seeing the oneness in the reality in and around him. In the same way, Cloud Gate’s community of wanderers gradually removes the obstacle of the river by dissolving its banks: they pick up the rice to let it slip through their fingers, spread it with the force of their bodies in a series of tableaux and release handfuls high into the air. Rice also rains in intervals like a monsoon until the entire stage is covered, merging the two rivers into one. Songs of Wanderers is thus not so much a narrative as a journey in which the seeking spirit of the wanderers aspires to the spiritual influence of the monk. The opening section, called Holy River, sets the character of this journey beautifully; accompanied by a Georgian folk song recorded by Rustavi Choir, the dancers move with calm control, quietly advancing to the river, the uprights of their staffs contrasting with the smoothness of their slow, meandering paths. Out of this meditative prelude that blurs time and space, Lin Hwai-min’s choreography takes a more structured form, weaving ensemble and soloists (Ko Wan-chun and Wang Wei-min) in formal sections with theatrical effects that remind us of space and time. The two deluges of rice are visually stunning, but the first is a device to mask the entrance of Wang Wei-ming at the beginning of his solo and the second seems to have no other function but to replenish the rice on stage. In a work where the material aspect of life slowly erodes into the immaterial, these devices jar and leave me feeling I am watching from the outside rather than participating in the journey.
Which brings me back to Wang Rong-ji. It is only when I see him move that I realise to what extent the physical body can represent the spiritual. Hesse uses the dialectic of words to point the way towards a reality that encompasses their opposition; in the physical realm, Wang-Rong-ji finds a corresponding unity between gravity and weightlessness and points to a qualitative development of movement. By contrast, the physical language of the wanderers does not develop beyond the earthy opening, suggesting a substantive divide between the physical and the spiritual; the transformative effect of their journey remains unfulfilled. Wang Rong-ji has been in the production from the beginning twenty-two years ago — Lin Hwai-min hired him specifically for the role — but the dancers in this production, apart from Wang Wei-min, are relatively new. Perhaps they are just trying too hard, like Siddhartha before he renounced his ascetic practices.
The final phase of Song of the Wanderers is the lone figure of Lin Hsin-fang meticulously raking the rice into a perfect series of concentric circles. He begins as the company takes their bows, when the concentration of the audience has already started to dissipate, and it must seem a strange ritual for those in the stalls who cannot see the pattern he is making. But in Lin Hsin-fang’s solemn, meditative gesture there is the signification of intent and, for those who can see it, the pattern he defines suggests the harmonious goal of all spiritual wandering.
