Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) is really embarrassed by his latest work, Listening to the River (聽河), which will have its world premiere on Thursday night.
He’s afraid he’s made it too pretty.
“The music is so beautiful, the images are so beautiful. Everyone liked the dress rehearsal but I didn’t. I was so embarrassed. I intended to do something simple, not so romantically beautiful,” the founder and artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) said in a telephone interview yesterday morning.
Lin has lived in Pali, near the Tamsui River, for almost two decades, so for years he has listened to the river and watched its many shifting faces and moods. But he never thought about it as an inspiration until after he returned from a retreat in India, where he had been fascinated by the wide array of daily life — and death — experiences that can be seen along the banks of the Ganges River in Varanasi.
The transitory nature of life, of illusions, has been a frequent topic of Lin’s over the past decade.
“The river flows down like the passage of time, but the river is also a reflection,” he said, citing not only the Tamsui and Ganges rivers as sources of inspiration, but also Confucius, the Chinese literary classic Journey to the West, Ghost Month ceremonies, Buddhism’s Diamond Sutra and Typhoon Morakot.
Images of rivers and the dancers will be projected on a screen that takes up two-thirds of the stage. Frequently the flowing water and flowing dancers will merge, until at one point a dancer watches his body washed away in a raging current. Footage for the torrent was filmed on the second day after Morakot. The dancers were added in during long days of a studio shoot.
“There is another dancer ... she’s facing the film [on stage], dancing with her image. She moves to the right when the film goes to the left, she’s floating on the river at the end. There’s a quote from Journey to the West, the monk Xuanzang (玄奘) saw his own body floating on the river,” Lin said.
“The mood in the backdrop doesn’t coincide with what is going on
on-stage. The dancers are joyful
when that’s not what is on screen,
and the opposite,” he said.
“I made two huge mistakes with this production. One is that I got the footage — the minute you use those images everything becomes so beautiful,” he said.
“The second mistake I made, I was hooked by Giya Kancheli [a Georgian composer now living in Belgium]. He’s a familiar composer and I got hooked on one piece, Night Prayers [a 1992 composition for string quartet]. Then I read his biography, this music is about the passage of time, life and death. What really got me was he’s from Georgia. I’m a big fan of Georgia. I
used Georgian folk songs in Song of
the Wanderers.
“It’s so exquisite I hate it. I was really sandwiched in between the music and the footage,” he said, adding that he still hasn’t decided whether to run the piece for the full 80 minutes or add an intermission.
“I will decide after the dress rehearsal. That’s why we are calling it ‘a work in progress,’” he said.
“Creating a work is like an adventure through the jungle ... you have to search, even if you don’t know what you are looking for. It’s also like having a baby. You have all kinds of guesses but when it comes out it’s not what you imagined,” he said.
Some parents have apparently been put off by the poster for the show, Lin said, but he has tried to reassure them.
“Someone asked about the naked butt on the poster: ‘How can I bring my kids?’ But the image is a metaphor, there’s just a very quick glimpse of butt,” Lin said.
Listening to the River is being staged as part of the 2010 Taiwan International Festival. There are still tickets available for next week’s shows — a rare thing, given that in recent years most Cloud Gate appearances are sold out weeks ahead of time. The more expensive tickets for each show are gone, but there are still tickets in the NT$400 to NT$1,200 range.
The company will also take the production on tour down next month, visiting Tainan on April 10 and April 11 and Taichung the following weekend.
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