Cloud Gate Dance Theatre is to present its new work, Send in a Cloud (霞), in Taichung and Kaohsiung from Saturday next week to May 8, after recently premiering two versions of the piece, which explores human emotions, at Taipei’s National Theater.
While the two versions share the same music — 12 pieces from Johann Sebastian Bach’s six unaccompanied cello suites arranged and performed by Japanese musician Yasuaki Shimizu with saxophonettes — and images projected on the stage’s backdrop, one version has 12 dancers and the other 13, the dance troupe said on Wednesday.
Cheng Tsung-lung (鄭宗龍), Cloud Gate’s artistic director since 2020, said during a post-show talk in Taipei on Sunday that he first began thinking about creating a piece using the Japanese musician’s recordings of Bach, which he was introduced to by film director Tsai Ming-liang (蔡明亮) in 2019.
Photo: CNA
Cheng said that he developed the piece with dancers working from home at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and divided them into two groups, as he has done in recent works for the tour.
However, after tapping into the dancers’ personal experiences when creating the piece, which seeks to explore and reflect people’s emotions, he ended up with two different versions, as the two teams of dancers were given latitude to perform using their own styles, Cheng said.
In developing the piece, Cloud Gate also held workshops for dancers to draw lines, shapes and whatever images reflected their state of mind, he said.
Those drawings have been used to created the animated backdrop, projection designer Chou Tung-yen (周東彥) and animation designer Wei Ho-ting (魏閤廷) said during the post-show talk.
Grammy Award-winning artist Marcelo Anez created the sounds, some using recordings made by dancers in their daily life, as transitions between the 12 Bach pieces and for a few segments, some of which are performed differently by the two teams of dancers.
In addition, he arranged for Shimizu’s music to be played through specially placed speakers at the venue to create a unique sound experience for Cloud Gate’s new piece.
“It appears to be the same show,” Anez said in an Instagram video posted by Cloud Gate before the tour began. “It’s like watching the same movie twice, and quickly realizing it’s not the same movie.”
Send in a Cloud is to be staged at the National Taichung Theater with the 12-dancer version on Saturday and Sunday next week, then the 13-dancer version on May 7 and 8 at the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts. Tickets are available through the OpenTix service.
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