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[THE WEEKENDER] Petals, mirrors, hair - a voyage to hell and back

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Whisper of Flowers, Cloud Gate Dance Theater (雲門舞集) artistic director Lin Hwai-min’s (林懷民) latest work, is perhaps his darkest yet (although Wind Shadows two years ago was moving in that direction). I say that perhaps because I have now seen the production three-and-a-half times (the half was a press call in August) and Lin has been continuously tweaking it, and in the process lightening the mood considerably.

Act One is deceptively beautiful. It is light, airy and very colorful thanks to the brightly hued costumes and the thousands of pink petals strewn about the stage and blown on as the act progresses. The dancers spend almost more time in the air than on the ground, quite unlike Lin’s usual style.

The act opens with a wonderful solo by Huang Pei-hua (黃珮華), followed by a duet for Tsai Ming-yuan (蔡銘元) and Shen Yi-wen (沈怡彣). Huang, clad in an apple-green dress, is as crisp and clean as a bright fall day as she twirls across the stage. Tsai has really grown as a dancer in recent years. He and Shen shine in their duet and Tsai achieves terrific height in his leaps. The rest of Act One is a mix of duets, quartets, quintets and ensemble work that ends in a swirl of color as the white backdrop rises to reveal a mirror and the dancers cavort through a wash of petals.

The flowers are gone as Act Two opens. The stage is darker, with mirrored panels stretching across the back of the stage. Huang repeats her opening solo to the same piece of music, but the mood is completely different. Now there is poignancy, a sense of loss. The feeling of despair grows with each successive movement. Clad in torn white briefs (and camisoles for the women), the dancers are trapped in an apocalyptic landscape, the squeaking of their bodies as they drag themselves across the stage almost drowning out Yo-yo Ma’s (馬友友) cello.

The first full-length run-through I saw, in Chiayi on Sept. 11, was very dark in this part, with Lin Keh-hua’s (林克華) mirrored set and Chang Tsan-tao’s (張贊桃) lighting creating visions evocative of Hieronymus Bosch’s tortured bodies or the old Taoist hell of Hong Kong’s Tiger Balm Gardens. It was hard to pick out an individual body, much less recognize a dancer.

Last Friday at the National Theater, however, the stage was no longer quite so dark; you could almost see which limb belonged to which body. Lin had also created a new solo for Chou Chang-ning (周章佞) at the end of Act II. Spotlit behind one of the mirrors, Chou was a reminder of the paradise lost in her red dress, as the rest of the cast dragged themselves offstage. Whispers was stronger with Chou’s additional solo, but I have to admit I preferred the more tortured lighting that I saw in Chiayi.

Last Monday in the National Concert Hall you quickly learnt that sitting in the second row is not advisable when the production on stage has the orchestra, albeit a small one, placed directly above you, with the soloists behind them, but not raised that much higher. It’s impossible, therefore, to say anything about the singing of the long extract from Madama Butterfly that began the Un Bel Di — Puccini Festival evening. What was clear, though, was that the Hsin Tien Youth Orchestra (國立新店高中音樂班管絃樂團), composed entirely of high-school teenagers, was outstanding, even under the auspices of a school specializing in music, and possibly also taking in students with special musical talents.

After moving back 10 rows following the interval, the vocal elements of the second half of the evening, the one-act opera Gianni Schicchi, were clearly audible. Now I could both see and hear the soloists, neither of which had been possible before. And it was enormously gratifying to discover that Dennis Chung-kuang Lin (林中光) was every bit as convincing in the title role as his predecessor in the Taipei Symphony Orchestra’s production a month earlier had been. Conducted by Yang Chih-Chin (楊智欽), this was, even with virtually no scenery, a very enjoyable experience, and the near-hysterical applause of the large audience, many of them clearly student friends of the young instrumentalists, was well deserved.

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