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By Hanna Kite
Posted Monday, October 3, 2005; 21:00 HKT
When some artists create something utterly new, they want to destroy all the art that came before them. Not Lin Hwai-min, Asia's synthesizing dance genius. After training with the Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham studios in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lin returned to his native Taiwan and set up the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, which specialized in adaptations of Beijing operas and Chinese epics. Lin says he was "young and cocky" and wanted to prove that his performers were equal to their Western counterparts. By the 1990s Lin wearied of successful but predictable productions. He started stripping his pieces to essentials, what he calls the "impulse" of dance—its raison d'être, its spirit, not just its form.
The Chinese concept of qi (energy) became one inspiration. Lin tried to show how qi is absorbed from the ground and travels through the dancer's body. Chinese calligraphy is another. The 2003 Cursive II begins with a woman dancer twisting on a bare stage. She is joined by three other women, then a group of men. They continuously circle, sometimes pausing in stylized poses and releasing their breath in unison. The poses evoke the end of a brush stroke.
The result is dance unlike any other, though not at all austere: Lin still loves elaborate sets and saturated colors. (Three tons of rice fall from the rafters in the 1994 Songs of the Wanderers.) Nor is the dance sterile. "I want to seduce a physical reaction from my audience," Lin explains. In Taiwan, audiences often rise and cheer. (Outdoor shows in cities like Taipei attract crowds of up to 60,000 per performance.) In Europe, spectators have been known to burst into tears. At 58, Lin is still choreographing: Cursive III, the final installment of his calligraphy trilogy, will debut this November. Lin is fond of saying that he is "working on borrowed time." But if the advances of the past decade provide any indication, his best work is yet to come.
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