Most people in Taiwan are probably aware of the country’s preeminent performance group, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集), even if they have no interest in modern dance.
Board a bus or a subway here, and you may see images of the troupe’s dancers emblazoned on the sides. Visit New Taipei City’s Tamsui District (淡水) and you may catch a glimpse of the company’s gleaming new US$22 million home, which opened in April. If you travel on China Airlines, you may even fly on the Cloud Gate liveried aircraft, adorned with dancers’ likenesses. The airline unveiled it last year, saying the troupe represented the “pinnacle of Taiwan culture.”
Founded in 1973, Cloud Gate was Taiwan’s first professional dance company. Forty-two years later, it has become a roving, bounding symbol of Taiwan. Cloud Gate on Wednesday opened the annual Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the US premiere of a 2013 work, Rice. The visit marked its sixth to the academy, and its first stop on a tour that will include performances in Los Angeles (January) and Washington (February). The company moves on to Paris in the spring.
Photo: Chiang Ying-ying, AP
Promoting Taiwan’s image abroad is a responsibility that Cloud Gate’s founder and artistic director, Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), 68, does not take lightly.
“He’s a very public figure,” said Yatin Lin (林亞婷), a professor of dance studies at Taipei National University of the Arts. “Because of the political situation with [China], it’s very difficult for our political leaders to be active abroad, so many people see him as not just an artist but as a kind of cultural ambassador for Taiwan.”
CULTIVATING TALENT
Photo: Lin Ya-wen, Taipei Times
This month, that commitment was on display as the choreographer marched into the rehearsal theater at the company’s new complex, clad in his signature uniform (black T-shirt, black pants) and brandishing a black backpack and a pack of cigarettes. While he settled at a table facing the stage, the company’s 22 dancers readied themselves for their first full run-through of Rice in a month.
As the music — a compilation of Hakka folk songs, drumming and Western classical music — began, a lone dancer strode out holding a long, quivering rattan stick. In the next 70 minutes, the dancers stamped, leapt and folded and unfolded their bodies in a demonstration of Cloud Gate’s hybrid aesthetic, which combines Western classical dance techniques with Eastern “rounded” movements that draw on martial arts and tai chi. Missing from the run-through was the production’s backdrop, a sumptuous video filmed on location over a cycle of rice cultivation in Chihshang (池上) in Taitung County.
Lin Hwai-min sat mostly silent, scribbling notes and only intermittently shouting (“Don’t rush, don’t rush!” and “Breathe!”). After the dancers took their final, choreographed bows, he stood and went through his notes, working with individuals on minor tweaks. The rehearsal had gone well, and now the dancers just needed to focus on taking care of their bodies for the coming season, he told them later as they sat around him on the stage, stretching and massaging their muscles with foam rollers.
AMBASSADORS OF TAIWAN
Later, in the company’s offices, Lin Hwai-min talked about the obligations he felt toward the dancers and society.
“I often remind the dancers that when they are onstage, they are often the only Taiwanese people that a lot of people get to see that are actually labeled as Taiwanese,” he said.
Growing up as the oldest of five children, Lin Hwai-min nurtured multiple passions, for politics, writing and dance. Only years later, while a student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, did he decide to pursue choreography. He had spent two summers in New York studying dance at the Martha Graham School, and after completing his degree at Iowa he returned to Taiwan, and soon started Cloud Gate.
The company’s birth came just two years after what Lin Hwai-min, like many other Taiwanese, sees as a defining moment in the nation’s recent political history: the 1971 resolution that displaced the government in Taipei as the representative of China at the UN in favor of the government in Beijing.
“When I started the company I said, ‘Composed by Chinese, choreographed by Chinese, danced by Chinese, for a Chinese audience,’” said Lin Hwai-min, whose family has lived in Taiwan for generations. “Then Taiwan was kicked out of the UN and all of a sudden I had to figure out who I was.”
‘CREATING AIR’
As the company’s stature grew, so too did the modern dance scene in Taiwan.
“Before Cloud Gate, there wasn’t even such thing as a wuzhe (舞者),” said Ping Heng (平珩), 57, the founder and artistic director of Dance Forum Taipei (舞蹈空間), using the term for dancer. “Before, people thought dancing was something you could do in school, but it wasn’t something worthy of being a profession. They just called dancers ‘tiaowu de ren (跳舞的人),’” literally, people who dance.
Lin Lee-Chen (林麗珍), 65, the founder and artistic director of the Legend Lin Dance Theater (無垢舞蹈劇場) in Taipei, said, “The dance scene in Taiwan today is very diverse,” with dance companies “of all sizes and styles.”
When asked about his possible retirement, Lin Hwai-min was reluctant to comment. But he acknowledged that the company’s new complex, which he said would allow his troupe and other dance and theatrical ventures to perpetuate the “Cloud Gate energy,” would make it easier for him to step away.
Still, “I don’t want any statues,” he said. “I’m a Buddhist. I think everything is just illusory, especially for dancers.
“We know that dance happens, but it also vanishes when it happens,” he said. “All we are creating is air. We are giving society a different air, that’s all.”
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