The staging and score for each piece are also very different.
The score for Cursive I is by Qu Xiaosong (瞿小松), a contemporary Chinese composer based in Shanghai. For Cursive II, Lin made the surprising choice of American avant-garde composer John Cage (“people say what a pleasant surprise, we never thought Cage could sound so nice”), whose work featured for decades in the dances of one of Lin’s dance heroes, the late Merce Cunningham. Wild Cursive is about the essence of sound — there are waves, wind, temple bells, the chirping of cicadas and the percussive music of a dancer’s exhalations and foot slaps.
The first show features black-clad dancers, a bare white floor and video and slide projections of the work of master calligraphers. For part two, the color scheme gradually shifts from white to the browns of ancient scrolls, using projections once again. Wild Cursive features 10m-long strips of specially made rice paper that are lowered and raised from the rafters, onto which an ink and water solution is carefully fed through meters of tubing to create a pattern that takes the length of the show to complete.
When asked if he has a favorite among the three pieces, Lin laughed.
“I used to think ‘oh god.’ In the end, I love the second piece the best. In terms of movement, it’s not as complicated as Wild Cursive. It’s not as spectacular as the first one in terms of theatrical production. It’s so quiet, serene, uplifting ... And at the end you hear the audience [he gasps] — an intake of breath.”
However, Lin doesn’t want people reading too much into his works.
“The point is, a lot of people think simply that the trilogy expresses calligraphy. I say I’m a poor writer of calligraphy. I can’t express calligraphy. It’s dance, it’s not about calligraphy. Calligraphy is just a springboard,” he said.
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