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Dancing into controversy

By Diane Baker
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Apr 21, 2006, Page 13

Bulareyaung Pagarlava, left, and Lin Hwai-min choreographed Cloud Gate's new production, which includes the politically-sensitive song Formosa. PHOTOS COURTESY OF CLOUD GATE

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.

"They couldn't jump and run like young kids. It was wonderful; it was a hit ? We had some huge screens that became pattern screens for bamboo ? and a guy playing a flute," Lin said. "And it became the basis of several of the other works that I did later."

"But I wanted to stretch it into two more pieces, to make it a whole evening," he said.

The look of the trilogy is very stark, with the dancers all in white. But the trilogy picks up speed as it moves into the second movement and then the third.

"In White 2 it looks like we have a piece of black fabric hanging over three-fourths of the stage ? it looks like a UFO ? it casts a shadow," Lin said. "The dancers are in white ... and there is tape on the floor that we slowly take away until the whole floor becomes a white floor. The UFO falls apart and lifts to the sky ? so everything falls apart until there is just a white background and white floor."

Lin said his dancers are used to grounding themselves on the floor and doing more with their arms than their legs, which is why he wanted them to do something different for the final dance in the trilogy.

White 3, Lin said, is "legs, legs, legs ? they dance more on one leg than on two feet."

"It's very fast, very sharp, very amazing," he said.

"It's not ballet, it's more kungfu," he said. "You have to have kungfu to have total freedom on stage."

As for the final piece on the program, Lin said that he thought it would be wonderful for Bulareyaung and well-known Aboriginal folksinger Kimbo to work together on a piece.

"They come from the same village and they are [distantly] related. But Bulareyaung had never met Kimbo before, so I asked him to go back home and listen to Kimbo. It was a very emotional experience for Bulareyaung; he ended up crying the whole time [that Kimbo was performing]." Lin said.

"Formosa is only one song. The rest of the music is Aboriginal songs. Some of them Bulareyaung had never listened to before. So he had a good homecoming," Lin said.

"But I also wanted to honor Kimbo," Lin said. "Because he never went commercial, for more than 30 years. He is still a folksinger."

"Kimbo's blood and efforts kept the song (Formosa) alive, in certain corners, through the dark parts. He would sing from the back of trucks during rallies. Last year, with his CD, more people heard it. But Bulareyaung had never heard it before ? no Cloud Gate dancers had heard it," Lin said.

"People in Taiwan are so afraid to confront their immediate past. The media is so commercial they don't review it. They didn't review the song Formosa. There is a strong lack of a sense of history," Lin said. "It's precisely because of this we wanted to do this song. It carries the history of Taiwan."

Lin put the telephone down for a minute so he could go and get a copy of the lyrics, which he then read.

"We hope that through our performances this song will be sung again. That it will become a base, a foundation, for everyone," he said. "Every time I hear the song and the words `Beautiful is our name,' I can't help but cry."

"Meilidao shouldn't been seen as so political; it must be reclaimed as a beautiful song," Lin said. "Everything is so political these days. This song should go back to the people ... It doesn't have the fingerprints of the DPP [Democratic Progressive Party] or the KMT [Chinese Nationalist Party] on it -- We should reclaim ownership of this song."

Asked if it wasn't so much the politics, or fear of politics, that was keeping people away, but the fact that his work has become increasingly abstract in recent years, moving away from the literary basis of his early works, Lin demurred.

"The original White had a good name," he said, "People know it."

For Lin himself, he prefers to keep things simple these days. When it comes to his choreography and set design, "I have become a black and white guy," he said.

That's true for his personal style as well.

"Nowadays, I only wear black," Lin said. "I kid people that there is no [safe] choice of color this days."

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