Birthdays and anniversaries are a time to reflect on past glories and look to the future. Cloud Gate Dance Theater (雲門舞集) founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) has done just that by presenting a revival of his acclaimed 1998 production Moon Water (水月) and creating a new work, Whisper of Flowers (花語), to mark his troupe’s 35th anniversary.
All five performances of Moon Water at the National Theater were gone by early August. There are still tickets left in almost all price ranges for Whispers, however, though by the time the Taipei run opens in two weeks, most of the shows are likely to be sold out.
It’s understandable that Moon Water tickets went so fast. The piece was an immediate hit when it premiered in Taipei, and has been in demand by international festival programmers ever since.
Set to Russian cellist Mischa Maisky’s recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello, Moon Water is the apotheosis of Lin’s incorporation of taichi movements into his choreographic vocabulary. It is both a meditation on taichi and a meditation itself, with the dancers’ slow movements requiring intense effort while giving the illusion of being effortless.
The set by Austin Wang (王孟超) and lighting design by Chang Tsan-tao (張贊桃) were equally stunning, resulting in a stage that is transformed into a moonlit pond (and one that requires a huge network of hoses to send water rippling over the stage, warmed so that the dancers don’t catch a chill).
As a birthday bonus, Maisky will be performing live on stage on Sept. 29 and Sept. 30, something Lin said took years to arrange.
“Several festivals tried over the years to get us together but our schedules conflicted. I sent a [Moon Water] DVD to Maisky and he loved it. He came last year [to Taipei], so we met, talked about working together and then he went home and pushed his schedule, changed things,” Lin said. “He was supposed to go on a cruise with his family; he cut his vacation short to do this before he goes to Tokyo.”
“The dancers are excited, but at the same time you can’t ask musicians to do everything exactly the same; it [Maisky’s performances] makes it very exciting … the breathing is going to be beautiful. CDs don’t breathe,” Lin said.
“Mischa is going to play downstage right in a spotlight … he’s going to be a visual counterpoint” to the dancers, who always travel left to right in Moon Water, Lin said.
As excited as Lin is about the collaboration with Maisky, he admitted he has mixed feelings about Moon Water, which the company took on tour to the UK, Italy and Spain this spring, and will perform in Greece in late November.
“I really want to retire it but it’s scheduled through 2011; it’s going to be in the Vancouver Winter Olympics. This year is the year of Moon Water, we’re performing it throughout Europe and UK, whether I like it or not,” he said.
Whisper of Flowers, Lin said, could be seen as a prequel to Moon Water, and not just because he returned to the Bach suites for the score.
“When I finished Moon Water I thought there was so much beautiful music I didn’t use,” he said.
However, he didn’t set out to create a bookend to Moon Water. He dropped two ideas for a new piece, even though they had gotten to the point of working on sets. Then the idea for Whisper came to him when Cloud Gate was in Portugal to perform at the Sintra Festival in June last year.
“We went to a park, there were red camellia trees, huge, three stories high. We went there after a rain, the petals were all on the ground like a carpet, shinning on the green. I decided to drop everything and concentrate on this,” he said.
The carpet of camellias reminded him of lines from Dream of the Red Chamber, the classic Chinese novel that had inspired his 1983 work of the same name. But Lin was also inspired by Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
In both stories, the gardens (or orchard) play a key role in the life of the main characters. Both stories conclude with the destruction of the garden, the end of an era, of paradise lost.
“The Cherry Orchard is about a lot of things, but I just take the beauty and the chopping of the cherry trees at the end … Cherry Orchard, Dream of the Red Chamber, are talking about the same thing: youth gone, about living unaware of doom … In short it’s about life — life happens,” he said.
Life happens to dancers as well, as time takes its toll on the body. Lin’s use of deep plies slowly segueing into taichi sweeps must be awfully hard on his dancers’ knees. Lin wanted a lot of height in his new piece, so he focused on the junior members of the company.
“This time for the first time I have senior dancers [sitting] out; I only use young bodies. It’s like a younger version of the company, they really jump,” he said. “The seniors deserve a break.”
Cloud Gate also looks like a different company in the first half of Whispers because of the costumes, which are a collection of jeans, T-shirts and swinging little dresses in muted Easter-egg tones. The stage is awash in color: hundreds of pinkish-red petals cover the floor, with more being added at intervals.
The second half of Whispers takes on a progressively darker tone, both in the staging and the choreography, though it is hard to describe the changes without giving too much away. But, like Moon Water, mirrors are a crucial, and visually stunning, element.
After last Friday’s world premiere in Chiayi, famed stage and lighting designer Lin Keh-hua (林克華) said Lin Hwai-min had just three words for him when they starting working on the Whispers last fall: petals, mirrors, hair.
While the petals might have been the easy part (they’re similar to what the company used in Dream and Cloud Gate 2’s Oculus), getting the right effects with the mirrors and figuring out how to get the hair to do what they wanted took months, he said.
Lin Hwai-min calls the hair “special performing hair.”
“The black hair, it’s tricky, creepy. You are not aware of it until the dancers start to move and it starts to move as well. The audience doesn’t know what it is at the beginning. It’s fine hair, not like a Japanese horror flick, but it gradually gains power,” he said.
But the hair, like the mirrors, disappears in the end.
“At the end the mirrors are gone, the dancers are gone and the audience confronts an empty stage, all white. It’s the end of Whispers, perhaps the beginning of Moon Water,” Lin said.
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