Wind shadow was stunning.
But wouldn’t it have been more accurately billed as “Cai Guo-Qiang feat. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre”? The dancing wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t that memorable. The moments that will stay with me had little to do with the dancers: the impossibly endless waterfall of billowing black silk, the sea of fluttering kites, the blizzard of black snow and the eerie green laser vortex that swirled into the audience and ended the show.
It took me a while to figure out what was disturbing despite all that was impressive. First, what did Lin and Cai mean to say? It was clear that there were two strands in the show. There was a contemplative portrait of man and his reflection(s) that came through in serene duets between standing dancers and their black-swathed shadows on the floor, and the haunting tension as one by one the silhouettes of man and kite progressed across the stage. The other strand was about war and oppression, painted in gunpowder, a sea of flags, ant-like bodies writhing to the sound of gunfire, explosions and mass rallies, followed by the creatures’ extermination by a descending black horizon. Each of these strands was an obvious continuation of the artistic philosophies of Lin (philosophical introspection) and Cai (socio-political angst). Though there was a clear switch from contemplation to war/oppression, it was difficult to reconcile the transitions and I am not sure if the two ideas really met in the intermediary sequences peopled, among others, by a troupe of puzzling bare-chested macho blokes sailing around the stage in Oakleys and the black or white pennants of Chinese opera generals.
The movement vocabulary of this piece is unique among Lin Hwai-Min’s oeuvre and significant in the evolution of his choreographic style. But I feel that it is also the weakest point in this piece. When this piece was created in 2006, Lin had just completed of the third installment of his well-loved Cursive trilogy. He must have been aware that his signature martial-calligraphic new Chinese dance style had reached its zenith after an evolution of more than ten years, and that he needed to move on to something different (and how it has, in the six years after that!).
Wind Shadow appears to have been an experiment in meshing Lin’s signature style with two giants of the second wave of American modern dance: the stillness and clockwork precision of Merce Cunningham, and the technology and complete visual experience created by Alwin Nikolais. Technology like warping mirrors and lasers can be a great way to make the same old movements look very different. At other moments in Wind Shadow, I wondered if Lin had been trying to allocate the athletic kineticism and curved flow of his signature style to the kites and flags onstage, and reserve more of the static element for the dancers. Unfortunately, even after four years, the dancers of Cloud Gate still looked like they had not found the innate energy for the static poses that we might see in Cunningham dancrs, or the organic connection and partnership with the props that is so wonderful in some of the Nikolais works. The Cloud Gate dancers still do best what their training has moulded them for – this was most apparent in a lively, lyrical duet danced by a female dancer against a circle of light, and her partner dancing sometimes as her shadow and sometimes as a cheeky counterpart silhouetted from behind the cyc, whirling and curving in different sizes as he moved to and away from the light source.
Am i simply splitting hairs? Shouldn’t a performance simply be allowed to exist as that unitary work of art? I appreciate Dr Loon’s comment (chain on Bryan’s post on the same performance) about audiences knowing what they want and wanting what they know. Watching this piece, there were moments when I found myself struggling against my training in one specific discipline of the arts. On the other hand, I don’t know if that accurately reflected the mood in the theatre after the show (26 May). Ecstatic thunderous applause! Endless curtain calls! Certainly a whole bunch of the people in there weren’t worrying about whether they had just seen, dance, visual art, theatre, or philosophy. They were, literally, blown away. They had bought into the total theatre experience, of which Nikolais would have been very proud.
Sze
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