Lin Hwai-min (林懷民) promised his latest work would be super simple, and he delivered at Friday night’s world premiere — Water Stains on the Wall (屋漏痕) is so stark, so austere in its otherworldly beauty that it is almost a paean to Zen minimalism. I thought he had stripped down to the basics for Cursive II (行草貳), but he’s cut even more away.
It’s as if the 70-odd minute show were a crucible, one lit from the sides instead of below, however, boiling down Lin’s three decades with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (雲門舞集) until at the end, the very essence of Cloud Gate has been distilled — quiet, superbly disciplined and pliable dancers moving with languid, meditative poise and superhuman control.
The curtain goes up to reveal all 14 dancers posed on the ramped stage. They slowly, almost imperceptibly, begin to move down toward the audience, an apt prelude for the rest of the show, where the bulk of the action takes place at a glacial pace — moving about as fast as a water stain grows on a wall — despite the occasional leap, shoulder-somersault or windmilling of arms.
Thirteen dancers glide off and Su I-ping (蘇依屏) is left alone for a solo — just as she is at the end of the show — slowly undulating her upper body, while her legs stay grounded, moving in just a small area on the sharply raked floor. She is so entrancing that when the first projections of inky “stains” appear on the ramp near her, they are so subtle, and grow so slowly, that you don’t even notice them until she stands still for a split-second. She completes a 360° turn and then sinks down into the classic Cloud Gate uber-low plie, with most of her body below knee level so she looks like an “m.”
Only then does a second woman, Yang I-chen (楊儀君), appear on the upper right of the stage. They begin a duet — in the sense that the two dancers share the same space at the same time. This motif was repeated throughout the show; while there were occasional pairings or triplets or quartets, rarely did the dancers dance in unison and there were no real “star turns.”
Most of the action in Water Stains on the Wall is spiral-based, firmly grounded in the tai chi-martial art vocabulary that Lin has developed into an art form all its own, redefining what dance can be and just how foldable human beings can be.
Lin said he liked the music of Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa chose for this piece because it had “lots of space.” It did; it also had minimal sounds.
The projections ranged from wispy vapors to dark patches that crawled down from the top, until the speed of the images picked up and they began to whip from left to right. At one point the stains shot up the ramp, rippling as fast as a whirlpool, while five women on the ramp appeared as if they were floating on the top of clouds. It was the most visually arresting segment of the night.
I liked Water Stains, but I don’t think it will be everyone’s cup of tea. You have to be willing to sit and contemplate in silence; every cough or rustle in the audience echoes. There is nothing to distract you — no lush music like the Bach cello concertos for Moon Water (水月), no slowly developing ink scrolls as in Wild Cursive (狂草), none of Wind Shadow’s (風影) explosions. The man to my left on Friday was reduced to trying to read the program in the limited light. Still, Water Stains is a testament to Lin’s creativity and willingness to bare all. Purists should like it — and its “Eastern flavor” should make it a hit with European festival audiences.
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