Taiwan Today

When Lee Tsai-er (李彩娥), a 16-year-old slip of a girl and one of Taiwan’s most famous dancers, won the solo competition in Japan’s first National Dance Contest in 1942, it was a rare moment of national pride. Lee was being judged by the Japanese, who administered Taiwan as a colony of the Japanese Empire from 1895 to 1945, and she was performing a dance, March of the Pacific, that celebrated Japan’s imperial expansion. For Lee and the Taiwanese audience members, however, it was a victory, both personal and political, and she accepted her award dressed in a Chinese gown.

In Identity and Diversity: Celebrating Dance in Taiwan, a new collection of essays that weaves together the rise of a modern Taiwanese identity with the history of modern dance in Taiwan, contributor Chen Ya-ping (陳雅萍) asks “What role do the ‘liberated’ Asian female bodies play in this seemingly contradictory relationship of identities?” The collection is at its best in the essays that sift the nuances of this struggle between the liberating aspects of dance and the desire of Taiwan’s dancers to establish a political and cultural identity.

That Taiwan’s dance traditions exhibit the tensions between cultural and national identity and the struggle for individual expression should come as no surprise. The country’s unique geopolitical status has given the question of identity a central place in modern Taiwanese society. While Taiwan is recognized as a major contributor to the global economy and the first example of a fully democratic Chinese state, the country’s efforts to garner official political recognition are almost invariably blocked by mainland China.

The increasing worldwide recognition of Taiwan’s dance community can be explained only in light of this struggle to establish an identity that is both unique to the island and understood in the international traditions of dance. Indeed, tradition might be the wrong word. For as UK-based dancer and freelance writer David Mead points out in the chapter “ReOrienting Taiwan’s Modern Dance,” Taiwanese dancers grappled with the question of identity even as society was rapidly changing. “Cultural realities must be considered,” Mead writes, “and the reality of Taiwan today is largely one of capitalism and urban modernity.”

That tension between the search for national identity and the global cultural currents that make national identity far less important in the arts lies at the heart of the volume. If Taiwan’s early identity struggle was oppositional (not Japanese, not Western), today it has merged with a global debate over the role of identity in an increasingly homogenized world.

Dancing in Opposition

Before Taiwanese dancers could set out to define a positive identity, however, they engaged first in a complicated dance of resistance against the Japanese colonial government. Taiwan’s relationship with its colonial legacy is complex and nuanced. The Japanese, on the one hand, quashed the political hopes of the people of Taiwan, and many Taiwanese chafed under the rule of a people who believed themselves to be culturally superior. Yet, despite the illiberal political environment and cultural chauvinism, the Japanese introduced many of the trappings of modernity in an effort to make Taiwan the jewel of its colonial project in Asia.

After contemplating the material superiority of the Western world, the Japanese had earlier set out on their own modernization project. Scientific methods were applied to everything from education to the military to transportation. In Taiwan, the Japanese paved new roads, laid railroad tracks, introduced electric lighting and dotted the island with grand brick buildings that stood as symbols of Japan’s desire to build up their empire to equal the wealth and authority of the West. Many of these buildings, which were Japanese interpretations of Western building styles current at the time, can still be seen in Taiwan. Two examples in particular stand out: the Office of the President, which served as the office of the governor-general under the Japanese, and National Taiwan University, then known as Taihoku Imperial University. While the first, with its central tower shooting skyward over the low-slung buildings of colonial Taipei, was intended as a display of authority, the second played a more ambiguous role in shaping Taiwanese society.

The Japanese viewed education as a method for improving the lives of Taiwanese people in a mission civilisatrice reminiscent of the efforts of Western colonial powers and as a way of indoctrinating their colonial subjects as citizens of the Japanese Empire. In the first case, the Japanese unquestionably succeeded. Literacy rates jumped with the introduction of compulsory education, and primary and secondary schools sprang up around Taiwan. Although the Japanese forced the teaching of Japanese and indoctrination efforts intensified along the path to militarism in Japan, one gets the feeling that the Taiwanese largely benefited from the boom in educational opportunity. Even today the role of Japan in Taiwan’s history is debated in Taiwan with considerably less bitterness than in other parts of Asia.

Liberating Movement

This introduction to modernity and the scientific and educational practices of the West, by way of Japan, brought with it Taiwan’s first experience with modern dance. In its earliest days, dance in Taiwan was taught as a form of physical education, as the Japanese prized physical prowess and relied on it to empower their militarist ideology. But the experience, especially for Taiwan’s women, proved liberating. Physical education had never been much prized in Confucian society, and women especially were encouraged to follow more traditional paths to marriage and motherhood. Compulsory education gave them new options, and young dancers encountered the joys of self-discovery through the movement that characterized modern dance.

As Taiwanese dancers became more professional, their worlds became wider. Some traveled to Tokyo to train with Baku Ishii (1886–1962), the founder of modern dance in Japan. Ishii, who was much influenced by Western dance methods then in vogue, introduced his dancers to ballet and modern concepts from Eurhythmics, an expressive movement art that allows dancers to interpret musical compositions through improvisation. Taiwanese dancers even traveled with Ishii to Europe, and the Japanese colonizers thus opened the path for Taiwanese dancers to encounter modern dance in its Western birthplace. “In the ‘belated enlightenment’ of colonial modernity, Japan served as the arbiter of anything and everything progressive and civilized,” writes Chen in her essay “Colonial Modernity and Female Dancing Bodies in Early Taiwanese Modern Dance.”

It is not without irony that the liberation of Taiwanese dancers to express themselves through modern dance was introduced by a colonial power determined to harness local identity to the rigid hierarchies of the Japanese Empire. Ultimately, however, the Western educational methods introduced by the Japanese allowed Taiwanese dancers to move to their own rhythms. And indeed, dance in the postcolonial period is concerned largely with the struggle to define an independent identity for Taiwanese dance.

Perhaps it was destined that a former writer would shape a national narrative for dance in modern Taiwan. Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), Taiwan’s most famous choreographer, has spent most of his life using dance to explore the meaning of national identity and the particular aesthetics of dance rooted in the traditions of Taiwan’s people. His obsession with dance arose through contact with the West, and in particular a captivation with The Red Shoes, the 1948 film by British directing duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger about a dancer who struggles between her personal life and her passion for dance.

Lin, who studied journalism at the University of Missouri and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, both of which are highly regarded in their respective academic disciplines, was thoroughly familiar with the intellectual debates in the West and the traditions of American modern dance through his studies with masters like Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. On returning to Taiwan, Lin founded Taiwan’s first modern dance troupe, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, in 1973 to harness these disparate influences into works that specifically addressed the history and identity of the people of Taiwan. “Lin integrated Graham technique, martial art movements from Peking Opera, the American avant-garde’s practice of outdoor training and concept of ritual theatre, as well as the Nativist aesthetics of glorifying labour and indigenous colour to create the now legendary Legacy (1978),” explains Chen, who describes that piece as “an epic dance drama depicting Chinese settlers’ immigration to Taiwan in the seventeenth century.”

The work premiered on the same day that former US President Jimmy Carter severed ties with the Republic of China, a low point in Taiwan’s struggle to be treated equally in the international community, and thus provided a bit of relief in the effort to ensure that Taiwan’s national voice continued to be heard. As performed on stage, Legacy was the closest thing to a national narrative yet to appear in Taiwan. No longer was the story of Taiwan’s identity overshadowed by the Japanese or left to be written by another foreign power. It is significant that Lin, reflecting Taiwan’s modern identity, drew on sources as various as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the traditional movements of tai chi. In essence, Lin was combining all the currents that formed Taiwan’s cultural identity, and this early work initiated a career that would raise Taiwan to a prestigious place in international dance circles.

If the volume has a weakness, it is in the lack of a full exploration of Lin’s career, for it is the most fascinating and influential in the history of dance in Taiwan. In the chapter “Roots and Routes of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s Nine Songs (1993),” however, Lin Yatin (林亞婷), an assistant professor in the School of Dance at Taipei National University of the Arts, parses the influence Lin Hwai-min’s travels in Asia had on one of the choreographer’s dance epics. The title of the work, Nine Songs, comes from an ancient Chinese text, and the piece represented a new stage in Lin Hwai-min’s exploration of his own intellectual identity. “His decision to travel to remote regions of China, Tibet, Indonesia, and India was a conscious effort to ‘decolonize’ himself from his previous education in the West,” Lin Yatin writes.

It is that very willingness to constantly resift the layers of identity and influence that have made Lin Hwai-min and Cloud Gate so sensitive to the complex questions of identity. And as Taiwanese society changed, the choreographer changed with it. Cloud Gate’s performances became less conscious of national narratives, but continued to explore the question of what it meant to be Asian in the modern world and more specifically what it meant to draw from the traditions of Taiwan’s cultural heritage without stifling the creativity necessary to conceive truly modern works.

In the trilogy Cursive (2001), Cursive II (2003) and Wild Cursive (2005), for example, Lin Hwai-min attempted to render a moving version of Chinese calligraphy on the stage. His dancers practiced calligraphy regularly to become intimately familiar with the way the ink contrasted with the empty spaces on paper. Works like this have given Lin Hwai-min an astonishing international reputation, for even in the Western home of modern dance, artists are struggling with the same question of how to preserve cultural identity in a world made increasingly homogenous by globalization. Cloud Gate’s performances had evolved from seeking to give Taiwan a national narrative to offering an answer to pressing questions that are asked all over the world.

The legacy of Cloud Gate has been an explosion of interest in dance in Taiwan. Not only has the group spun off new dance troupes headed by dancers trained by Lin Hwai-min, but also raised the professionalism of Taiwan’s dancers to a very high level. While Lin Hwai-min managed to write the first narrative of Taiwan’s national identity through movement, a newer generation today is staging dances that focus more narrowly on the identity of the individual.

WCdance founder Lin Wen-chung (林文中), for example, creates performances that mimic the claustrophobic sensations of the modern urban environment. His staging requires the dancers to contort and stretch out in close contact and in close confines. In “ReOrienting Taiwan’s Modern Dance,” Mead describes Lin Wen-chung’s obsession with the miniature: “He prefers to challenge his dancers to work in a small space, as in Small (2008), where almost all the action takes place in a 3-metre square Plexiglas box, or Small Songs (2009), where it all happens on a 4-metre square raised platform,” Mead writes.

Capturing the abstraction and fragmentation of modern life on stage has pulled Taiwan’s younger choreographers directly into contemporary global dance currents, where tremendous energy is exerted in all directions and little emphasis is placed on national narratives. “What Chen Ya-ping refers to as ‘self-imposed Orientalism’ has given way to great diversity and fragmentation, as today’s dance makers push traditional boundaries,” Mead writes.

Mead, however, also makes a very good case that these personal narratives—focused on the more quotidian aspects of modern life—are also an exploration of what it means to be Taiwanese. “In a sense, however, commenting on their Asian-ness, or at least Asian life, is exactly what these young choreographers are doing,” he writes. “The difference is that while they consider issues in, and that affect, society as a whole, they do so in a very personal way.”

Curiously Fragmented

Like the state of modern dance, Identity and Diversity has a curiously fragmented feel, even for a collection of essays. The chapters range from the scholarly exploration of identity to the staging of the dance routine for the opening of the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, then go on to examine the Taiwanese adaptations of Labanotation, the visual notation system created by dance artist and theorist Rudolf Laban in the 1920s. Yet, from the fragmented chapters, one is left with an impression of the remarkable speed that Taiwan’s dance troupes have managed to grapple with both national history and individual identity in a society that is determined to be modern and intent on putting into motion the myriad answers to the question of just what it means to be Taiwanese.

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Robert Green is a regular contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan and teaches a course on race, class and ethnicity in film at the City University of New York.

Copyright © 2013 by Robert Green