I’m glad I went back to see Listening to the River (聽河) a second time. I was still not impressed with the piece, but I’m not as disappointed with it as I was after Thursday night’s premiere at the National Theater, where it was the final dance production of the 2010 Taiwan International Festival.
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) artistic director Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) said he was afraid he had made the piece too pretty. It is pretty, but pretty in the way that trays of cakes at the average Taipei bakery are — nice to look at but when you bite into one you find lots of air; there’s nothing substantial beneath the surface.
Listening to the River doesn’t have either the choreographic or emotional punch of Lin’s last two works for his company, Windshadows (風影) and Whisper of Flowers (花語).
Chang Hao-jan’s (張皓然) videography provided beautiful footage of sunlit waters, gently flowing water, burning lanterns floating on black currents and raging torrents (courtesy of Typhoon Morokot), while Ethan Wang (王奕盛) was credited with the projection design that allowed dancers to dance with their own images in the water. Visual and set designer Lin Keh-hua
(林克華) said they spent a lot of time reviewing all the footage that had been shot and then matching the segments to the music, which included pieces by Giya Kancheli, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, David Kechley and Somei Satoh, among others.
The water was beautiful, projected onto a screen that fluidly expanded or contracted to fit the needs of the 10 segments. However, sometimes it was more interesting to watch the projections than the dancers, or watch how the change in the currents or colors of the water was so well matched to the mood or tempo of the music.
Lin Hwai-min has choreographed a series of solos, duets and group pieces that showed the pliability of his dancers, but left them strangely disconnected, for the most part, from one another as well as the audience. Even the duets and trios seemed more like solos placed together then a collective element.
The one exception was a quirky duet by Lee Tzu-chun (李姿君) and Wong Lap-cheong (王立翔), set to Kechley’s The Funky Chicken. The moves were a mix of Lin Hwai-min’s unique pairing of tai chi and modern dance, with a few street dance moves thrown in. Lee’s smile lit up her face and while the couple still danced separately for the most part, you could feel a connection between them and with their audience.
Cloud Gate dancers are so terrific that it’s wonderful to watch them no matter what they are doing and Tsai Ming-yuan (蔡銘元), Huang Mei-ya (黃媺雅), Huang Pei-hua (黃�? and Su I-ping’s (蘇依屏) solos showed just how good they are. Su also packed more drama and emotion into her Night Prayers segment than the production had as a whole.
As for the naked butt so proximately displayed on the company’s posters and brochures for the piece, there was no sign of it in the actual show.
The company takes Listening to the River on the road next month, with performances at the Tainan Municipal Cultural Center Performance Hall on April 10 and April 11 and in Taichung Chungshan Hall on April 17 and April 18. If you haven’t bought tickets yet, try and get seats on the left side of the hall, it’s a better angle to watch the show.
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