On May 12 this year, 62-year-old choreographer Lin Hwai-min received a lifetime achievement award from the International Movimentos Dance Awards in Wolfsburg, Germany. Launched in 2004 as a quinquennial event, the second Movimentos awards also honored the best dance piece, best female dancer and best male dancer, this year from Britain, Spain and France respectively. As the founder and artistic director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Lin was praised by the awards jury, which was composed of artistic directors from major dance theaters or festivals from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Norway, for liberating Taiwanese dance arts from Chinese traditions without wholly breaking loose from those traditions and for succeeding in linking a rich cultural heritage with the modern art of dance. The jury also recognized Lin’s broad knowledge of Asian and European cultures and contemporary art trends, placing him on the same top rank of creativity as 20th-century master choreographers including George Balanchine, William Forsythe, Birgit Cullberg and Maurice Bejart, Lin’s French predecessor in the Movimentos award.
The Movimentos title is just another of the numerous major awards that Lin and his works have won in the international dance community since he obtained a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Iowa in the United States in 1972. He formed Cloud Gate the following year as the first professional troupe of modern dance in Taiwan or in any Mandarin-speaking society. The Movimentos award jury had reportedly been quite moved by Lin’s trilogy of Cursive (2001), Cursive II (2003) and Wild Cursive (2005), with the titles referring to a flowing script style of traditional Chinese calligraphy. In a 2006 review of the Berlin tour of the three works, the senior German dance critic Jochen Schmidt wrote that there was no other work on the international dance scene at that time that came anywhere close to achieving the artistic significance of Lin’s trilogy.
Cloud Gate emerged in the early 1970s in contrast to the then government-backed paradigm of Chinese folk dance and somehow also recalled the introduction of ballet and modern dance to Taiwan in the 1930s during Japanese rule (1895–1945). Instead of pursuing the Chinese “folk” dance styles that were often more invented than traditional, Lin and his dancers set out to explore Taiwan’s social, historical and political issues in such works as Legacy (1978), My Nostalgia, My Songs (1986) and Portrait of the Families (1997).
Cultural Identity
German critic Schmidt has written that, anxious to create a Taiwanese dance art, Lin has helped to give Taiwanese people a sense of cultural identity through his very original, personal vocabulary and that the Cursive trilogy can be viewed as a synthesis of Lin’s oeuvre. Essentially, the trilogy represents its choreographer’s recent efforts to first and foremost gratify the dancers’ desire for movement. “My mission is to serve my dancers,” Lin says. “Their movements are the only truth of dance.”
The Han character yong shows the basic strokes of calligraphy in a scene from Cursive. (Photo by Liu Chen-hsiang, Courtesy of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan)
In September this year, the Cursive trilogy was presented for the first time in succession at home in Taiwan. Adhering to the schedule was an extremely exacting mission for the bodies and minds of the troupe’s some two dozen dancers, with five shows of each of the three works plus rehearsals at the National Theater in Taipei during three consecutive weeks. “Different muscles and mentalities are involved in each different piece,” Lin said during a talk with the audience after one of the evening shows. “This is the first time that we’ve had masseurs available backstage.”
Cloud Gate dancer Sung Chao-chiun hints at some of those demands in describing the works as “a chase through endless time and space to reveal a distant, mysterious culture.” The mystery lies in the writing of Han characters, often considered one of the highest art forms of Chinese civilization. The Cursive pieces bring to life the thousands of years of calligraphic tradition by transforming a dancer’s body into a “huge writing brush” on stage, according to Cloud Gate dancer Liu Hui-ling, who had to take calligraphy lessons along with her fellow dancers as part of her preparation for the performances.
Such a metaphorical connection to calligraphy, rather than the artistic value of writing itself, accounts for much of each Cursive dance. “The Cursive trilogy has never been intended to be a representation of calligraphy, but is actually a motif, a direction or an excuse for dance,” Lin says. For the choreographer, calligraphy is an infinite source of inspiration that led him to wonder how a body would move in relation to how a Han character is written on a piece of rice paper. This helped to shape a unique style distinct from Western dance paradigms and also helped to evoke a “collective unconscious aesthetic,” as Lin puts it, in Taiwan society.
Lin recalls that at a performance of Swan Lake by an international troupe in Taipei when he was a university student, he overheard a woman’s loud comment after the show that the genre was impossible for local dancers because of their short legs. At the time, Lin was not persuaded by her opinion, but later on it proved to be very true. He explains that, as an art of lines, ballet requires long arms and long legs for dancers to stand beautifully on tiptoe and to leap through the air making perfect arcs. “But there are also dances for short legs,” Lin says.
A successful fiction writer before committing himself to modern dance, Lin is adept at explaining the theoretical aspects of his work. For example, he notes that while Western cultural traditions such as Gothic architecture seek to go upward reaching toward the sky, Eastern traditions such as the architecture of the Forbidden City in Beijing extend horizontally on different levels. The former develops straight lines that rise up high, whereas the latter favors lines that expand out horizontally. In terms of performance styles, much of the movement of choreographies Lin creates is directed downwards, rooted in the ground.
A scene from the more relaxed Cursive II (Photo by Central News Agency)
Since the early 1990s, Lin has been using traditional Chinese or Eastern physical disciplines including meditation, martial arts and tai chi chuan in the training routine for Cloud Gate dancers. “After initial resistance that bordered on an outright revolt,” Lin says, “our dancers have become quite comfortable and happy with the mainly downward movements.” According to the choreographer, such movement practices often start from an inner part of the body and focus on moving outward such as starting from the belly and moving toward the limbs in a continuous flow of energy. Major results from this approach include Songs of the Wanderers (1994) and Moon Water (1998), the latter being selected by The New York Times as dance of the year in 2003 among other accolades.
Moon Water in particular can be seen as an artistic expression of tai chi dao yin, a style of tai chi chuan practiced by Cloud Gate dancers that was developed in the 1970s by Hsiung Wei. For Lin and a number of other prominent Taiwanese performing artists, Hsiung is very much an artist himself with creative, revolutionary views about human body movements, which share much in common with the Cursive trilogy. Tai chi chuan, developed in 15th-century China and associated with Taoism, represents an inward-looking form of martial arts that focuses more on relaxation, perception and body alignment than a display of muscles or other external developments. Hsiung’s variation pares down the practice to what he considers the 12 essential tai chi exercises based on the overall disciplines of dao to guide the breath and yin to guide the body.
Defying the Rules
Different from the traditional form of tai chi chuan that emphasizes precise movements in sequential order, tai chi dao yin allows practitioners to freely produce variations according to their level of physical fitness and strength. Likewise, the Cursive trilogy allows dancers to use their own imaginations to interpret the time-honored writing art, especially in Wild Cursive, which German critic Schmidt has asserted as “emancipated from all tradition … in forms that defy all rules.”
Wild Cursive was presented as the opening show of the 2007 Next Wave Festival organized by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. In a review of the performance, the senior dance critic Deborah Jowitt commended the work as a “blend of discipline and freedom, of meditative patience and suddenly unleashed power” that “connects ancient practice with modern innovation in exemplary ways, eschewing the explicit violence we so often see onstage today.” All in all, the trilogy is poetic or “peaceful,” as Jowitt commented on Wild Cursive, “however powerful the kicks and implicitly adversarial the poses.” The dance critic observed that in all three pieces in the series, “the dancers don’t imitate the shapes of the symbols, but embody the qualities of flow that make writing appear on a page.”
In Cursive, classical works of calligraphy are projected on a backdrop. In an impressive scene, a dancer moves as an image gradually appears behind her of the character for yong, which is usually used to demonstrate to beginners the eight basic strokes of Chinese calligraphy. In another scene a transparent screen at the front of the stage is covered with projections of cursive script, while dancers move with the words, which also move across their bodies. “It reminds one of the influential folk practice of ‘tattooing,’” writes Chiang Hsun, a painter, writer and a promoter of everyday aesthetics, in his latest book The Beauty of Han Calligraphy: Dancing Cursive published this year. “Tattooing words or symbols on the body [by projecting images of writing on the dancers] creates a very different feeling and is even more significant than engraving words on metal or stone.”
A dancer performs in Wild Cursive, with ink streaking down a scroll behind. (Photo by Liu Chen-hsiang, Courtesy of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan)
In yet another memorable scene from Cursive, a female dancer in black performs in front of a huge word written by the distinguished calligrapher Tong Yang-tze as if writing with the long, flowing sleeves of her costume, called “water sleeves” in traditional Chinese dance. Tong also wrote the four Han characters of Cloud Gate’s Chinese name, yun men wu ji, which refers to a now lost form of ancient Chinese dance. Lin notes that his “water-sleeves” dancers are not sweet or seductive as were the women of the imperial Chinese court among whom the form of dress originated, but are rather sober and unsmiling. Lin says that in the first work of the trilogy, the dancers are put in such a tight “calligraphic framework” with so many things crammed in that they are more likely to “write” in standard script instead of using the freer, cursive style.
In the lighter, more relaxed Cursive II, dancers do not perform like diligent learners of calligraphy any longer. Projections of antique eggshell-white porcelain with its “cracked ice” glaze replace the calligraphic masterpieces. The use of unmelodious, elliptical music by John Cage (1912–1992), one of the most influential composers and music theorists of the 20th century, adds to the elusive feel of the work.
Leaves in the Wind
In Wild Cursive, dancers move among several long white scrolls that drop and rise from time to time during the performance. Ink sometimes streaks down the scrolls, although without forming any recognizable words. Chiang Hsun says that, with regard to writing Han characters, the most mysterious element is the ink, which he compares to smoke, light or a memory. The writer depicts the Wild Cursive dancers, who use their bodies to the extreme, as “messy leaves in wild wind,” “a falling flower struggling to break free of the bough” or “a most lonesome martial art that has no one else but itself to conquer.”
Lin Hwai-min believes that cultural traditions are something of a double-edged sword that can be both an inexhaustible fountain of inspiration and a source of great restraint. “However, each generation must make some attempts to create something that one can call one’s own from those traditions,” he says. More often than not, for the choreographer and his troupe, the biggest thing to conquer is their own restless desire to find a solution to some puzzle in art or in life, “as though one is lost in a forest and yet feels excited by the need to find a way out,” Lin adds. That excitement will continue to drive one of the most creative and intelligent cultural forces in Taiwan. There might not be a Cursive IV, but the dancers of Cloud Gate will go on writing with their bodies across the stage.
Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com