Creating his own tradition

Lin Yuan-shang (林原上) insists that he is the title role in his latest dance performance that premiered at Taipei's Huashan Arts District yesterday. "I am a bastard," he said, delighting in the provocation. The title of the show was originally Chinese Bastard, shortened to Bastard in English, and translated as the rather featureless Fellow (家伙) in Chinese by organizers fearing that local audiences might take offense. Lin has little time for these political sensitivities, for his life and his work has been directed towards blurring such ethnic and political distinctions.

"I am a Chinese man who lives in France, I am a Beijing opera performer who practices contemporary dance ? In France they say I am Chinese, in Taiwan they tell me I am French. So you see, I am unique. I am a bastard," Lin says with a broad smile, sitting Huashan's cavernous performance space smoking roll-your-owns. His talk is a torrent of Chinese, French and English, his hands, his whole body moving and gesturing as he speaks. Small but well muscled, his energy is infectious.

Lin started training in the martial roles of Beijing opera at the age of 11. It is a tradition he continues to treat with respect, but no longer wants to be bound by. Since moving to France in the middle 1980s, he has worked extensively in modern dance with the Theatre du Soleil and later with Maguy Marin. He got his first big break in 1996 with the solo On Which Voyage Are You Taking Me Tonight? and since then has gradually gathered a personal team of artists around him to create works that are part of his own artistic tradition. "Bastard is a work in the Lin Yuan-shang tradition," he said.

A dancer who believes he has stepped out of the frame and created his own tradition, Lin is nevertheless totally without arrogance. "I am not a genius, but I progress one step at a time," he said, quoting a French proverb about a bird building a net from little bits of everything. "Creativity is not difficult," he said, "it simply takes time. I am never afraid that I will not have ideas for my next work, because there are so many great people working together with me." For Lin, art and life are very much interrelated.

In Bastard, Lin's first multimedia work, the visual imagery was created by internationally acclaimed film director Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) whose film What Time is it There? (2001) created a sensation at Cannes last year. His style seems particularly suitable for the highly urban feel of Bastard, which also makes use of shadow images so that the two dancers can interact not only with each other, but with the images of each other. These images are then manipulated using mobile screens that form the only props of the minimalist stage located in the cavernous interior of Huashan's performance space.

The music, by French musician Frederic Blin, is a mixture of ambient sounds taken from around Taipei. One remarkable dance sequence uses a rhythmic baseline integrated with manipulated sounds of Taipei streets. It is remarkable what is achieved with the ding-dong sound that we hear every time we enter a 7-Eleven store. Blin, who has collaborated many times with Lin, said that with Bastard the music and the movement of the dance have become a more complex interaction, with sound echoing movement, and movements echoing sound. The mix of techno, Chinese songs and other musical symbols make the dance very local for a Taiwanese audience, and is replete with a very urban vibrancy, tension and sorrow.