As soon as the audience begins milling into the theater for a performance of Nine Songs (九歌), a full-evening work by the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, they find themselves communing with nature. Running across the entire front length of the stage is a lotus pond: real flowers, full and pink, and huge green leaves hovering above a pool of actual water.
As everyone is seated, and before the curtain opens, the whole atmosphere begins to take on a natural serenity. The audience is drawn into the setting, surrounded by the sounds of a gently flowing stream and birds calling from above. The lights gradually dim to a dusk-like setting, then there is a moment of night time darkness before the first light of morning brings the pond back into sight.
The choreographer of the dance, Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), thinks the setting is crucial not only for the dance itself but also to fulfill some deeper needs of modern life. “Urban society is so full of artificial things,” he says. “How long has it been since we last paid attention to a flower or a leaf for one solid minute? I thought having a pond like that in the theater would be magical.”
As the curtain rises, we are transported further to a magical realm. The back and side panels of the stage reveal a magnificent lotus painting. Monumental leaves embrace us, as if we ourselves are in the midst of the lotus pond, small creatures looking up rather than persons looking down, the flowers towering above us. And in the midst of this pond, the water is not murky or mirky as we might expect: the leaves and flowers of the painting are against a background of luminous gold.
Set designer Ming Cho Lee (李名覺) recalls the idea that Lin related to him when they were working together on the set: “From the very beginning he felt a lotus leaf was very important:” Lee says. “And he wanted to bring nature into the theater.” The effect of the lotus pond and the lotus painting does create an environment far removed from the urban sprawl outside.
But Lin’s Nine Songs is not this simple. It deals with more than the beauty of nature. In fact, the dance that follows is in shocking contrast to this initial meditative setting. It is a captivating ninety minutes of richly diverse, often startling, images that deal with the intense frustrations and fears of existence—as well as the hope for renewal. It brings together gods and mortals, allegory and history, the ancient past and modern times, and a variety of cultural influences. It includes music from India, Tibet, Japan, and the indigenous tribes of Taiwan; it draws on movement styles from China, Southeast Asia, and the West. And the distinct sections of the dance are held together by Lin Yu-shan’s (林玉山) stylized lotus painting, which has been reproduced on large panels that open and close in various configurations, creating a dynamic, continual presence.
The initial inspiration for the dance came from a series of poems also called Nine Songs written more than 2,000 years ago by Chu Yuan (屈原), a poet who had been wrongly accused of treason and banished by the court. Living in exile in southern China, Chu found solace for his disappointment and frustration in the primitive rituals of the local people. He rewrote the rituals into poems, capturing the original animistic quality and also incorporating his own metaphorical criticisms of the state. In similar fashion, Lin translates Chu Yuan’s work into his own contemporary idiom, but he still holds to many of the basic primitivist images of shamans and gods. “What attracts me [to Nine Songs] is the exotic part, the idea of something remote,” he says. “But there’s another thing—living in Taipei and dealing with the frustrations of modern life. We need a container to speak about this. So it’s the present as well as the remote places and the remote metaphors.”
The overall effect of Lin’ s Nine Songs is a highly theatrical and ritualistic dance opera—and one of the most impressive performances to have appeared on the Taipei stage. Created especially for Cloud Gate’s twentieth anniversary, it was a fitting tribute to the island’s most prominent modern dance company. The dance was well-received not only at last August’s premier in Taipei, when almost 20,000 people crowded into the National Theater’s outdoor plaza for a live broadcast of the sold-out performance that was going on inside, but also in Hong Kong, where the South China Morning Post reviewer was nearly ecstatic. And German dance critic Jochen Schmidt, who saw the Taipei opening, described it in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as “a dance that towers above all other new dance performances of the season either in Asia, America, or Europe.” Cloud Gate will present Nine Songs this month in Vienna.
After the serene prelude, Nine Songs opens tranquilly enough, with a group of celebrants dressed in thin, white robes proceeding through a sort of baptism or purification ceremony. They individually make their way to the lotus pond and silently anoint their foreheads with water, then join a communal circle.
But then enters the witch, or shamaness, whose starkly pale skin is set off by a bright red, tight-fitting dress. Her unsettling presence is the first indication of the harrowing pilgrimage that will unfold as the dance progresses. She regally enters the circle, turns toward the audience, and suddenly begins a trance-like dance of frantic sensual intensity. Her body bends back and forth in painful, percussive movements, her long fingers spread threateningly. The celebrants surrounding her hum in monotone and beat long, thin sticks on the ground. The only other sound is her quick, panting breaths. Finally she falls to the floor in cathartic exhaustion.
The scene is thus re-set. We are now in the midst of a primitive rite, which will proceed through numerous transformations, some a momentary return to serenity, others even more intense than the witch’s self-purging, but each emotionally and visually riveting. First is the “Homage to the Sun God.” Through a narrow opening in the set, with white light flooding in, this aggressive, muscular deity enters. In a threatening gold-wire mask, he performs a duet with the witch that is part erotic, part confrontational. Their harsh, lustful dance sets up a further contrast with the surrounding spiritual beauty of the lotus.
Then the manipulative Gods of Fate take command of the stage, overseeing the vulnerable human masses. The people are turned and twisted and molded into position, or shoved and hurled about, sometimes by each other, sometimes by outer forces. The violent movement is set against the music of Tibetan Buddhist Tantras, chanted in voices so deep and guttural that they sound almost inhuman. Finally, the Greater Puppet and the Lesser Puppet clank awkwardly across the back of the stage in towering suits of wooden armor. They are just one of the dance’s many momentary visions that leave a clinging impression.
The second half of the dance begins with a return to nature, with the graceful, quiet River Goddess dancing to the highpitched, soothing voices of Taiwan’s Puyuma tribeswomen. A river of white silk, sprinkled with flowers, meanders under a deep blue sky and a huge full moon that nearly fills the back of the stage. But as in every other scene of the dance, an underlying disharmony threatens to erupt. The red-robed witch returns as a counterforce. And the goddess’ tranquil, swaying dance is marked by a sense of deep suffering. In the end she wraps herself in her own silken river and mourns.
The God of the Clouds changes the mood with a showy, confident dance. Moving statuesquely across a smoke-filled stage, he performs the entire sequence atop the shoulders and backs of his two attendants. Without hesitation, his head turns abruptly, arms glide quickly into position, a leg reaches high into the air, leaving him poised on one foot. His carriers may tremble and sway under the burden, but he remains aloof and exalted. The dance is a mini tour-de-force of balance and composure that always brings a round of applause. But it is also a disturbing display of tyrannical power.
The Cloud God’s proud showing is followed by the shy, diminutive Mountain Spirit. Surrounded by the high, distant sounds of an Indian flute, this fawn-like creature of the dark forest prances about tentatively. Knees, hips, and elbows bent and ready for flight, he looks this way and that, alert, frightened, and lonely.
The forsaken Mountain Spirit paves the way for the turning point of the dance, a section called “Homage to the Martyrs.” In white robe and headband, a young man executes a swift sword dance. As his weapon slices into the air, he symbolically cuts away the veiI of exotic, otherworld imagery. The gods have left, and we are transported to a more literal, mortal world somewhere in our own time. As in the original poems, the preliminary sections of the dance have really been a preparation for the politically tinged tribute that is to follow. From here, the dance will build to a brutal, ruthless climax.
In slow single-file, the “martyrs” enter, large wicker baskets over their heads, hands crossed in front of them as if tied. To audiences in Taiwan, the baskets are an obvious reference to the way that people were led to execution during the Japanese occupation. A heavy voice begins a methodical recitation of names. The list includes ancient Chinese heroes, people who died under the Japanese, and those who were executed following the February 28 Incident, a 1947 clash between the local populace in Taiwan and the newly arrived Nationalist government troops—an incident that has been taboo for discussion or public review until only recent years.
The names are slowly taken over by the sounds of heavy sticks striking against wooden boards. This builds into a cacophony of deafening, disturbing blasts, like the repeated firing of guns. The music, played by the Ju Percussion Group, creates an elemental force that seems to propel the dancers forward and at the same time stop them in their tracks. Ju Tzong-ching (朱宗慶), who composed the music, used only the most basic, natural instruments and a minimalistic approach. “I used a very simple rhythm: fast, slow; very loud and very quiet,” he says. “I wanted to use very direct ways to make the music. I want people to feel the tension of my music.”
As this tension builds to an almost unbearable level, the dancers rush in terror about the stage, only to be felled one by one. Finally, a lone boy rushes to the front of the stage, turns and bravely confronts two bright, menacing lights—a reference to the much publicized image of a young man who stood before the tanks at Tiananmen Square.
After a moment, he too falls, collapsing in front of the lotus pond. Suddenly all is quiet. The stage is still. The terror is over. The fallen dancers recover and slowly fill the stage with hundreds of lighted candles, placing each on the floor to create a stream of flickering light that extends from the pond into the dark, infinite realm of the night sky. The air is filled with the soothing choral echoes of Taiwan’s Tsou tribes-people. After what they have been through, the audience is given a moment to meditate, to rest the eyes, mind, and heart on a simple but life-affirming stillness.
We haven’t returned to the serenity of the opening scene, but rather found our way to a new, more profound serenity. It has been a journey from the primitive to the modern to the timeless. This is no longer some ancient ceremony or a twentieth-century political drama, but a modern-day ritual, one that the audience is no longer merely watching, but now a part of. It is difficult to leave the theater.
The startling contrast of the opening scene with the intensity of the main part of the dance now begins to make sense. The beautiful backdrop has opened and closed in various configurations throughout, but the image of the lotus has been there all along, holding together the diverse sections until the end. And now, as the central theme of the dance unfolds, the lotus takes on its full meaning as an ancient symbol of purification, representing the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
Choreographer Lin says he is drawn to the lotus not only for its beauty, but because that beauty is offset by a dramatic withering process, adding a metaphorical quality to its own natural cycle. “It dies so beautifully and so terrifyingly,” he says. “It takes a week to go through the process. It turns purple and dark and black. You see the beauty gone like that. You really see life go away.”
But Lin feels it is not the dying of the lotus—or the angst of the dance—that has made Nine Songs such a success. It is that the scenes of loss and death are surrounded by a sense of rejuvenation. Even the despairing images of the dance are transformed by their visual richness and mystical intensity. “Everybody was talking about the spiritual uplifting, and the beauty,” Lin says, “and the fact that it’s a mixture of many, many things.”
Much of this compelling mixture is drawn from Lin’s personal experience of recent years, especially the three years starting in 1988 when Cloud Gate was temporarily disbanded. During this time, he travelled extensively, to Indonesia, India, New York, Europe, and elsewhere. Lin was especially intrigued by Bali, where he found the lotus in abundance and was also drawn to the special amber quality of Balinese light—he even sent lighting designer Lin Keh-hua (林克華) to the island for ten days so that he could capture the same sense of light for the dance.
The multitude of influences can be found in numerous ways, but other than the music, often there is no specific cultural reference. The emphasis on strong finger and hip movements, for example, is drawn from a variety of Asian cultures—Chinese, Javanese, Indian—but often no single one in particular. The same is true of the inventive masks that the gods and goddesses wear. Even the lotus is found in Bali as well as here in Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia. The use of water for religious purposes might be found in ancient cultures as well as in Italian cathedrals of today. And the final image of the dance, with its hundreds of candles, could be traced to many sources: “It’s from Balinese gardens, but it’s also from St. Patrick’s in New York,” Lin says. “And of course it’s from the June fourth [Tiananmen Square] anniversary vigil, when people in Hong Kong light up thousands of candles in Victoria Park. But you also see them in Indian temples—nothing but candles.”
The emphasis on mixing cultures makes Nine Songs unlike most of Lin’s previous choreography. In the past, he often intentionally strove to express and reaffirm a Chinese or Taiwanese identity. This sense of distinct ethnicity has now been converted into something that more accurately reflects the situation of many modern people. “It’s just a pouring out of my life experience. I didn’t intend it to be Chinese,” Lin says of the dance. “Then again, what is Chinese? I think I have stopped knowing what is Chinese.”
Even the use of a well-known Chinese classic as the basic inspiration for the dance loses its cultural specificity in the midst of the many diverse images. And although at least one local reviewer found parts of the dance “too nationalistic,” the references to recent Chinese and Taiwanese history do not come across as political comments, but rather as examples of general human suffering and oppression. After all, the image of a young man standing in front of a tank was seen all over the world and drew reactions from people everywhere. And in the massacre scene, two figures emerge momentarily in the midst of the chaos—a man holding a limp woman in his arms. Although the sexes are reversed, the pose is drawn from Michelangelo’s Pieta, an image far removed from Chinese culture yet displaying the dance’s same sense of tragedy and pointing toward the same theme of death and rebirth.
Throughout the dance, there are continual reminders that we are not in one place or one time. The most effective of these is the Traveler, an intriguing Magritte-like figure in a Western-style suit. Sometimes walking with a suitcase, sometimes riding a bicycle, he periodically crosses the stage, often incongruously juxtaposed against a god or goddess absorbed in an ancient ceremony. He might be an image of the choreographer himself, on his travels. Or he might be ourselves, as we make our own progress through the many facets of life as they are represented in this dance. What is he looking for—his own self or something new?
He reminds us, as does the dance itself, of the contemporary worldwide emphasis on the search for cultural identity. But the dance also takes us beyond this. It reminds us that while laying claim to our respective roots may be an important process, it is only a first step. Nine Songs begins with the old traditions of Asia, but then builds on these, until it offers something much more inclusive, more embracing. It transforms the search for a cultural identity, or even a multicultural identity, into the search for a sense of universality. This message is beautifully summed up in the final scene of candles silently trailing off into the distance.