Theater for your soul

Anyone who knows Lin Hsiu-wei (林秀偉) would be impressed by her passion for dance and her fusion of eastern meditation and New-Age concepts.

Connecting body, mind and soul has been the focus of Tai-gu Tales Dance Theater (太古踏舞團) since 1988. War (巫的世界), however, will be a little bit different. The new dance, which will be performed at the Metropolitan Hall on Monday and Tuesday, will not only show the force of meditation, but it will also be very interactive by asking the audience to experience different rituals in the healing process.

"I hope the dance can be a stress-easing trip for anyone who comes to this show. You won't just view or appreciate the dance," Lin said.

Tai-gu Tales has won international fame for performances such as The Life of Mandala (生之曼陀羅), The Back of Beyond (無盡胎藏) and The Obsession of the Stone (踐花月之約), which toured New York, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg in the past 10 years.

Lin said a "mind-cleansing dance" did not mean that it was necessarily quiet and slow. On the contrary, she said, the dance would be quite noisy and colorful. It is divided into seven segments and will be performed in three different spaces: first at the central garden of the Metropolitan Hall, then on the stage inside the theater, and then back to the garden again for the closing segment.

The show's Chinese title, which translates as "The World of Witches" may explain better what the dance looks like. For the first 30 minutes of the show, there will be a body-painting and meditation ritual taking place at the garden. "Meanwhile, we will lead the audience to do breathing movements, to soften everyone's body, as well their minds," Lin said.

Then the audience will be taken through a specially decorated tunnel to enter the theater. The stage and costume designer, Chang Wang (張忘), has prepared a tribal design for the dancers. They will start dancing in the audience seats and begin a series of six themed rituals: war, pilgrimage, praying for rain, love, crying, death and resurrection.

In the ritual of praying for rain, dancer Ho Lien-hua (賀連華) performs a 15-minute Flamenco solo, holding a big tree that winds around her body.

The Flamenco dance represents the solitude and sorrow of wanderers. For Lin, it's also a metaphor of the contemporary human condition: Mother Earth finds the environment deteriorated daily from industrial expansion, while the tree of life finds it difficult to grow or reproduce.

Another highlight of the six rituals will be the love and sex ritual. Eight female dancers will shake their long hair to create a waving "sea of hair," while five male dancers will tumble acrobatically between the tides.

There will also be a solo dance by Lin's daughter, Wu Tsai-ling (吳采璘), playing a fairy. The 14-year-old Wu has obviously inherited a talent for dance from both her parents. Her father Wu Hsing-kuo (吳興國) is the celebrated actor and dancer in Peking Opera, films and also the founder and artistic director of the Contemporary Legend Theater (CLT, 當代傳奇劇場).

Wu recently won the teenage championship at the Taipei Modern Dance Competition.

"The [fairy] will experience death, being wrapped by gypsum and later all the other dancers will break the gypsum again for her resurrection," Lin said. "For me, all these rituals and ceremonies are ways to release negative energies from our minds and bodies."