Visually regarding the novel's verbal images and implications, Lin and the Cloud Gate Dance Theater transformed the classic poetic tragedy for a featured 7-day presentation of dance drama-a part of the Taipei Art Festival.
Abandoning the original classic sequence, Lin compressed the novel's thematic "vicissitudes of life" into four acts-spring, summer, fall, and winter, symbolizing the eternal cycle. He deliberately chose to be plotless; unversality was his hope. The characters blur: the young man in the garden, young women dressed in white, red, green, yellow, his parents ... and the young man out of the garden.
"This dance is not meant to present the novel, though the novel provided a framework for my conception," Lin declared. "Its frame is a paradise and paradise lost."
Lin, a onetime student of Martha Graham, is a choreographer who believes in using all the resources of the theater to move an audience—he thrives on the combination impact of dance, music, scenery, lighting, and costuming, creating organic drama-dances which now into spectacle.
He demands original music sub-limited to the mood of the dance, be it Chinese classical or modern, or both. To underwrite the universality of this Lin-choreographed dance, composer Lai Deh-ho added spicing from the Chinese pentatonic-scale to the basic recipe of woodwinds, brass, and strings. Brisk peals from Chinese drums and the brassy clang of gongs heralded entries and transitions in the image of Chinese opera. Lai, who has worked with Lin on half-a-dozen dances, worked on this one for a year and cherishes the resultant work as the peak point of his career.
The dance movements are uniquely Lin's. He borrows from Chinese opera more curves in the body movements, more eloquent finger gestures, more hand-and-sleeve movements, and he applies them to his own views of modern dance. He is imbued with ideas of space and breathing, psychoanalysis, and a sense of the cinematic. Thus, it is on two foundations that he contrives his metaphors-now encoded within 34 major works for the ten-year-old Cloud Gate Dance Theater.
The set design for Red Chamber was understated in comparison with other major elements of the production. Giant strips of chiffon ran across backdrops in abstracted levels of tone. Two white chiffon bands horizontally marked the stage itself, the effect being a stage extended, without end, as formless as the cosmos of genesis.
The curtain lifted on a bald headed man clothed in red gauze, sitting cross-legged at front-left stage, his right palm held erect in front of his chest, like a sculptured Buddha, deep in meditation. He nipped his left fingers, slowly arched his arm over his head, and quickly re turned it to its original position-as if he had just awakened from a trance.
The dance moved on to a flash back of the young man out of the garden. The audience experienced a prelude to the four seasons.
As the music smoothly flows in, a beggarly Taoist priest and a monk enter. They continuously reverse-ricochet around the bald headed man, now slowly pacing. A long-haired woman in colorful leotards strides in, a huge train of cloth following her. Suddenly she convulses, then gives birth to a sturdy youngster in green shorts. The first young man, in red, and the youngster in green engage in a symmetrical pas de deux, their movements unfolding in slow fluency, sometimes freezing in tableaux.
They are replaced by twelve young women in capes of twelve different colors, moving in procession. The stripes of the backdrop shift to a light pink, reflecting some opaque verdancy. The music quickens, thrumming with a gentle gaiety. Here comes the spring.
Rouged cheeks and dramatically made-up eyes, steps on tiptoe characterized by a slight binding, add to the impression of the twelve dancers as enlargements of those puppet dolls in plastic domes. Holding their flower-pattern capes with thumbs and middle fingers, swirling into manifold gyrations, they splash the world with floral fantasy.
Then, two solos: a lady in red leotards and a lady in white appear suddenly, discarding flowery capes. The white lady curves her body conservatively and stretches her limbs. The lady in red leaps and tilts in jubilation. Later, the young man joins them. Suddenly, a girl in ordinary period street dress, holding a branch high, shuttles between, alien to all on stage. And red flakes begin snowing. Everyone twirls to welcome the ruby festivity; a woman in court dress solemnly paces; the ladies bow, and the young man kowtows. The curtain drops.
As in the novel, the dance flash backs reproduce the imagery of dreams. Metaphors include casting the red gauze wrapping the young man under the feet of the long-haired woman—a shedding of blood; a long strip of red cloth hanging on a courtly-dressed woman betokens a blood relation.
As summer waxed, the chiffon bands of the setting changed, green and red overlapping each other. The music began to shriek, wavering with repetitiously inserted variations of low-keyed moaning. It was an atmosphere of prosperity, but wafting something stale.
A lady in yellow moves gracefully under a huge oil-paper umbrella, and everyone, including the courtly-dressed woman and the young man, kneel, signifying the arrival of the Emperor's concubine in the novel. She sets out a second time, this time displaying the cape inside-out and revealing a pall-like white lining; the beautiful umbrella is broken.
At the beginning of the second act, the young man's father, to direct his steps, entangles him in the red cloth strip. Many townsfolk now join the twelve maids, and the dance underlines the grandeur of their numbers. Multiple subplots develop; the gaiety of the garden is now haunted by sexuality and ghosts. A pas de deux by the young man and a lady in green moves limbs and bodies into a revelation of the delicacy and tenderness of lovemaking—the young man's first night.
This second act, though rising to grandeur, failed to repeat the fluency and unity embellishing its predecessor, a sacrifice for its colorful multiple episodes.
The young man in the garden, dancer Yang Yun-chung, performed in consonance with complex psychological demands, prismatically shifting his impact with the different ladies and toward his parents, full of content, clothed in aesthetics.
The third act moved on with pathetic and grieving violins, accented by sorrowful and gloomy cellos. The twelve dancers discard their capes, revealing their leotards. The white lady, always moving in an opposing direction to the other eleven, is a symbol that incompatibility exists. The young man in green and the white lady engage in a pas de deux full of persistent attachment, of reluctance to separate. Then, other dancers creep around them, their movements fore shadowing tragedy. The young man out of the garden reappears, apathetic to approaching fate. This act was the shortest of the four.
With the fourth act, winter (death) looms. Phantoms in black Skirts, hair bundled into tails, present with angular gestures and mechanical steps, in contrast to the movement of a delicate ballet dancer in white. The music calls in an impending tension. The young man out of the garden is now always present on stage. The lady in red leotards has now wrapped herself in a white cape—a symbol-reference of the lady she replaces in marriage.
The death phantoms separate the young man and the lady in white. Other ladies, all now with outer dress turned inside-out, revealing the white inner linings, gradually stretch on stage in a circle, like corpses in shrouds. The young man in the garden swings his arms, trying to break the red gauze enclosing him.
A gigantic band of white cloth is torn from one end of the stage and extended, covering the entire stage—its puffingly- unrelieved whiteness recalling the snow-palled earth at the end of the novel. The young man in red gauze, now out of the garden, raises his arms and kowtows, ending the dance via a last acknowledgment to his father.
Many who have loved the novel have criticized the dance for its failure to mirror the novel's narration. However, the dance is clearly identifiable with the novel.
Dream of the Red Chamber was a joint effort of the 30-member Cloud Gate Theater and alumnus Lin, who now heads the Taipei Contemporary Theater. Like previous dances choreographed by Lin for the Cloud Gate Theater, Dream presents new interpretations for the local theater in terms of modern dance, contributions of some magnitude.
Many critics have praised the Cloud Gate Theater for such milestones and for its general excellence over the decade, factors intimately connected with the guiding hand of Lin Hwai-min. But Lin, waving it all off, responds, "I don't want to look back. Ten years is still too young an age for a group to say anything really meaningful. I create what I must. That's it."