The music, magic and myths of Taiwanese dance

By GRAHAM REID

Oh yes, taxi drivers in Taiwan will discuss the dances with me, choreographer Lin Hwai-min assures me with a laugh down the line from his home in Taipei. "Everyone knows me here."

Lin is not immodest. His internationally acclaimed Cloud Gate Dance Theatre company, established in 1973, has frequently taken its ambitious work into Taiwanese communities and schools, presented free performances in the provinces and, in the past two months, has been in the areas badly affected by recent earthquakes.

Often these performances, of breathtaking visual language and with elaborate staging, take place in open squares and courtyards.

In addition to choreographing innovative works for his own company, Lin has written Taiwan's best-selling novel, Cicada, founded the Dance Department of the National Institute of Arts, was named by Jaycees International as one of the 10 outstanding young people in the world in 1983, is a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from New York, has been awarded an honorary fellowship by the Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts ...

No, Lin is not being immodest when he says everyone knows him. And at 53, while he acknowledges his work and style has changed since his much acclaimed Nine Songs premiered in 1993, he shows no indication of slowing down.

"Last September we started Cloud Gate Two, a junior company of 10 dancers. It has already given 60 performances, but we want to share the art of dance, especially with the grass roots in our country. And this year the main company will spend five months out of the country. It's getting crazy."

Cloud Gate's most famous work — for Lin, the most pivotal in his long career — is Nine Songs, an elaborate, two-hour spectacle in which he redefined the vocabulary of dance. He took as his inspiration a series of poems of the same name by Chu Yuan who, 2000 years ago while living in exile in south China, rewrote local myth and animism into metaphor.

Lin's Nine Songs, which he describes as "intercultural," will be performed at the Aotea Centre from next Thursday.

Aside from characters in primitive masks, movement redolent of tai chi, spirit figures and gods, Nine Songs incorporates oddly contemporary characters (such as the Traveller, a curious, Magritte-like bourgeois figure who appears without comment) and refers to the killings at Tiananmen Square.

It has drawn superlatives from reviewers internationally; at its premiere in Taipei, 20,000 people sat outside the theatre and watched the performance on giant video screens.

The work sings with myth and magic, and brings together music from Tibet and India, Taiwan's aboriginal people and Javanese gamelan. The dance company tours with the Ju Percussion Group.

Right from the start, says Lin, Nine Songs had universal appeal and it received rave reviews in the United States and Europe.

"We have made 10 American tours so far and we go three times a year into Europe."

For Lin, Nine Songs was a breakthrough work, the one in which he "took the liberty to be free."

"It was the result of my life in 1989 and 90 when, after the company was temporarily suspended, I travelled through Bali, Indo-nesia, India and Tibet. I am tired of travelling in metropolitan cities, but when you go to India you find people living in a very different way. So my concern in the work is with very human situations.

"Some people have said it is about the separation of man and God, but I believe God was created by man," he says, declining to interpret the work for others.

It is the very humanity at its heart which has given the production its universal appeal: it refers to the ceremonial aspects of life (baptism and purification rituals), sensual frenzy, martyrdom, death and rebirth.

Critics speak of the timeless and often non-specific quality of the work, and the evocations of nature which further humanise it in an increasingly technological world.

It opens with a meditative atmosphere of birdsong and natural serenity — a 15m-long pond, holding 4200 litres of water and filled with lotus plants, is being constructed in the Aotea Centre orchestra pit — and closes with a stunning river of candlelight. But between times, in striking friezes and muscular dance, it explores shamanistic ritual and includes symbolic gesture. (A swordsman cuts away the ethereal imagery before a politically charged section in which there is a recitation of the names of ancient Chinese heroes and of people who died at the hands of the Japanese and during a 1947 clash between the Taiwanese and nationalist troops.)

Lin acknowledges it was a crucial work for him in its amalgam of various dance, movement and musical styles: "It was the process of speaking the craft out and of the work finding itself. It took four years to produce. It was such a relief to get it out."

It was also the culmination of years of academic study as much as travel through Asia.

Lin studied Chinese opera in Taiwan, classical court dance in Japan and Korea, and is lightly dismissive of the line in many biographies which suggests he was also mentored in modern dance in New York by Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham.

Although he spent time with those geniuses of dance, he says many people make too much of the connection.

"My training in New York was very brief. I spent three years in the States but for two and half years I was working on my degree in the Midwest. I didn't plan to become a dancer. I think I probably went to only four modern-dance performances when I was there — but in a way I consider that an advantage."

He jocularly notes most reviewers now say Nine Songs was his last contemporary dance work.

"I have changed very much since then. The concentration of the company is meditation and tai chi. Several of our new major works are of very slow movements and about the chi, the energy, which affects our lives. I draw from everyday life in Taiwan.

"Nowadays we have schools for kids, not teaching them dance, but how to move and how to use their bodies to express themselves. I don't believe you should teach young people technique; it's important for them to be at peace with their bodies."

Despite his workload and commitments — he tours with the company and is looking forward to his first time in New Zealand — Lin is also a man at peace with himself. Meditation is an ongoing practice and he lives by a river on the periphery of the tower blocks and clogged streets of metropolitan Taipei. And that has made all the difference.

"I can watch the river flow, become more mellow."

His new works reflect that quietened spirit. Cloud Gate will present a new work alongside Nine Songs at the Olympic Arts Festival in Sydney. It is Moon Walker, "an abstract piece with a J. S. Bach solo cello piece for the music."

"Then the next thing will be premiered in November 2001 and deals with Chinese calligraphy. I don't know what that is going to be, but basically the choreography of calligraphy. It will be called Cursive."

New York multi-media artist Laurie Anderson once said writing about music was like dancing about architecture.

So dancing about writing must be ... ?

If Nine Songs is any measure, probably equally astonishing.

* The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan production of Nine Songs opens at the Aotea Centre on Thursday, August 31.