“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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