“I'm very thankful I could talk with Eliot Feld. He reminded my why I want to dance. I love the movement. I hope I can make a language from the movement, that it will pay off,” he said.
‘PURE DANCE’
Flow is a departure from Huang’s earlier work, in which technology played a key role. Cloud Gate founder Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) said last year that he wanted Huang to leave the toys alone and get back to basics. This year Huang has.
“This piece is my first physical dance. This time for the first time it's pure dance,” Huang said.
Also on the Spring Riot program are works by Lin, Cloud Gate 2’s late artistic director Lo Man-fei (羅曼菲) and Ku Ming-shen (古名伸).
Lin's piece Spring Breeze (朢春風) is set to a popular Taiwanese love song. It's a very beautiful song, he said, about yearning and about Taipei’s bright young things, the kind who hang around Taipei 101. But the dance subverts the song's lyrics.
“Young ladies, urban babies — they are so cool, but do they still have that tender spot?” Lin said in a phone interview.
“It's about youth, confusion, yearning but you don't know what [you’re yearning] for,” he said. “It's played by Stephen Hough. He's a beautiful pianist from London. When he was at the National Concert Hall last year he played this song as an encore.”
Lin described Lo's 2005 All About Love (愛情), which is set to the music of Georges Bizet and Rachel Portman, as “tango-ish.”
“It's about youth, long legs, flirting. Of course they are not going to do the tango, but it has that flavor. It’s very bright and fast, very lively,” he said.
Lin has long been a fan of choreographer and Contact Improvisation proponent Ku. Her piece, Isthmus (緘墨之島), set to extracts from four Anton Vivaldi concertos, was first performed by Ku and John Mead at the Experimental Theater in 1993. Lin quickly picked it up for Cloud Gate Dance Theater, which performed it less than a year later on the main stage at the National Theater. Now he has added it to Cloud Gate 2's repetoire.
“Ku is really a contemporary master,” Lin said. “Ku's piece is about a couple and table. But the table could be a house, a bed, anything.”
BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE
Lin founded Cloud Gate 2 to foster young choreographers and develop an outreach program to promote dance nationwide. The troupe performs on stage as well as at school gymnasiums, playgrounds and hospital lobbies. It gives dozens of workshops a year.
Cloud Gate 2 has become a proving ground for young dancers. The Jingmei press rehearsal on March 22 doubled as a birthday party, with former members invited back to celebrate. Looking at everyone lining up for a group photo, I was struck by the number of ex-members who have gone on to careers with companies both at home and abroad.
“It's been 10 years. This is one of the few companies [in Taiwan] where you work every day,” Lin said. “I'm very happy they have done so much, that the artistic level [of the group] is lifted.”
“I'm building up a company, I'm not babysitting,” he said.
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