Dancing into controversy

Cloud Gate Dance Theater (雲門舞集) has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous in less than five months. Coming off the high of their acclaimed finale to the Cursive (行草) trilogy last fall, the troupe had every reason to believe that this spring's performances would attract the usual sell-out crowds. But they reckoned without the blue-green divide that seems to color almost every aspect of life in Taiwan.

A few weeks ago the company became so concerned about their lackluster ticket sales that they polled their regular subscribers and the big companies that usually buy blocks of tickets. The feedback they got was that people weren't planning on going this time because they thought the program would be too political.

"The companies said they didn't want to see something too political, whether it was blue or green," Cloud Gate founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) said in a telephone interview with the Taipei Times last Friday.

"People are so tired of politics, they just don't want to be bothered," he said.

It's hard to believe that one's political persuasion would influence whether or not one attends a dance performance, but this is Taiwan. Of course, given that Taipei is largely pan-blue, it should not have been so surprising that its residents might be leery of anything smacking of pro-green sympathies, unless it is green tea or vegetables.

The problem springs from the music used for the second work on the program -- Formosa. Meilidao (美麗島, Formosa) is a folk song that dates back to the late 1970s. The original lyrics were taken from a poem by Chen Hsiu-hsi (陳秀喜) that was adapted by Liang Ching-fong (梁景峰) and set to music by Lee Shuang-tze (李雙澤), a composer who encouraged local folksingers to sing their own songs, not covers of Western singers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. When Lee died in 1977, his friend the Aboriginal singer Kimbo Hu (吳德夫) premiered Meilidao at Lee's

memorial service.

The lyrics describe how beautiful Taiwan is and how the people's ancestors are watching over them. The song quickly became popular on college campuses.

But it became firmly linked in many people's minds to the pro-democracy political magazine Formosa and to the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident, largely because the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government banned Meilidao for many years after the incident.

Given the song's political history, it apparently wasn't too big a leap for some to harbor suspicions against the title of the first work: White X 3. White must be short for White Terror, they thought.

So if you have been shut out of seeing Cloud Gate over the past few years by having left it to the last minute to buy tickets to a performance, now is your chance to see the world-renowned troupe. While tomorrow night's premier is sold out, there are still tickets available for the rest of the run at the National Theater.

But what of the dances themselves?

The first half of the program consists of the first two pieces of Lin's trilogy, White X 3. After the intermission, there is the final segment White 3 and then Formosa, a 20-minute piece choreographed by former Cloud Gate dancer turned choreographer Bulareyaung Pagarlava (布拉瑞揚).

White X 3 has its origins in White, a piece that Lin created in 1998 for the Taipei Crossover Dance Company, which was founded in 1994 by four former Cloud Gate dancers (the late Lo Man-fei (羅曼菲) among them) who were over 40 but still wanted to dance. So Lin created a slower-paced work for them.