In step with Tang dynasty dance

Many outstanding performances have been booked for the newly reopened Chungshan Hall in Taipei. The reopening of this venue, after extensive renovations, has great historical resonance for Taipei's arts community. For Liu Feng-Shueh (劉鳳學), the artistic director of the Neo-Classic Dance Company (新古典舞團), it is a chance to display work that she has been working on for over 30 years. In Searching for the Roots of Dance (尋找先去的舞跡), she brings her modern dance company back one thousand years to the Tang Dynasty in a re-creation of ancient Chinese dance. To add to the feel of retrospection, two of the items in the program premiered at this same venue back in 1966.

The desire to understand the music and dance of our forefathers is a relatively recent phenomenon; most evident in the huge popularity of CDs of music "performed on original instruments." In Taiwan, traditions of nan-kuan music struggle for contemporary relevance, but the restrained beauty of ancient music has great appeal for a minority of admirers.

According to Liu, the Tang dynasty was the height of China's development in music and dance, but these two subjects have been little researched. "Music [in the Tang dynasty] had some attention dedicated to it in relation to culture," Liu said, "but the relationship between dance and music has not been sufficiently studied." Spurred on by a desire to understand her own culture better, Liu has dedicated a lifetime to re-creating ancient Tang dance, which has been very influential for both China and Japan.

Watching The Singing of Spring Orioles, one of the pieces in the program, you get a feeling of a dance which is recognizably Chinese, but which has a restrained and monumental dignity that is totally different from the boisterousness of Beijing Opera and is closer in mood to something like Japan's No drama. Neo-classical, which is considered a contemporary dance group, faced a considerable challenge in adapting to this new -- or old, depending on how you look at it -- style of dance.

"In modern dance, the emphasis is on large movements, stretching yourself or scrunching yourself up real small," Liu said, "It wasn't easy to achieve the restraint that is needed for this kind of dance."

Much of Liu's research was done in the imperial court in Japan, were valuable manuscripts have been preserved. The sixth century was a period of great cultural ferment for China and Liu pointed out the strong influence of Central Asia in many of the dances. In the dance Pa Tou a mask is used -- rather than the conventional Chinese painted face -- and many of the movements have elements of shamanistic ritual. In a sense, these dances are a formulistic representation of the great philosophical movements of that period, with aspects of Islam, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

Liu emphasized the importance of the historical research that has gone into creating these pieces and only minutes into the performance you will see that this is quite different from imitation or modernized Tang-style dance with its balletic movements that are totally at odds with the Confusion dignity that lies at that heart of pieces such as Spring Orioles.

While not particularly lively, this is a chance to enjoy new concepts and also the outstanding execution of what is probably as close as we will ever get to those glory days of Chinese dance and music.