12 ★ FT Weekend 22 February/23 February 2020
Arts
Taiwanese
dreams
CloudGate Dance| The
Taipei company’s new chief
brings an evocative piece
of local history to the west.
Peter Aspdenmeets him
Clockwise
from main:
‘13 Tongues’;
artistic director
Cheng Tsung-
lung; dancer
Lee Yin-ying
performing in
‘13 Tongues’;
‘Dust’— Lee Chia-yeh
creator of13 Tongues. The morning after
the performance, Cheng, a tall man
dressed entirely in black, tells me he is
up to the forbidding challenge. “I feel
that now is the right time to step up,” he
says through an interpreter. “It is only
through making new dance pieces that I
can find a way to grow into this job.”
He credits his “mentor” Lin, who at
the age of 73 will continue to work with
the company, with the choreographic
innovations that the company has
brought to the stage in its 47-year his-
tory. It was Lin, he says, who brought
together the skills of martial arts train-
ing with the more studied movements of
Qigong, a system of exercise and breath-
ing control related to Tai Chi.
Lin further refined his vision with his
elemental 2013 piece Rice, which
brought into the choreographic mix
everyday themes of ordinary Taiwanese
people. “It was a more grounded piece,”
says Cheng. “He was trying to bring
together traditional Asian dancing with
daily life. He was searching for a modern
language for dance.”
Cheng’s13 Tonguescontinues in that
pioneering spirit. He conceived the
w o r k a s a n
attempt to cap-
ture his child-
hood memories,
w h e n , a s a n
eight-year-old,
he helped his
father sell slip-
p e r s o n t h e
s t r e e t s o f
Bangka, one of
the oldest quar-
ters of Taipei. “My most prominent
memory was [that of] wetness, being
very close to the ground, and everything
being wet.”
The all-of-human-life nature of the
work is refracted through the child’s
vivid recollections. “It was a prosperous
district, but also very mixed,” Cheng
recalls. “There were prostitutes and
gangsters in the streets, a lot of shops,
temples, full of festivals and folk rituals.
“It was like an adult movie,” he adds, a
little coyly.
It was Cheng’s mother who used to tell
him of the stories told by “13 Tongues”, a
male impressionist who enraptured
street audiences with his folk tales and
deft impersonation skills in the 1960s. It
is the bringing together of those phan-
tasmagorical stories, with the clamor-
ous activity of street life that sur-
rounded the charismatic fabulist, thatA
woman dressed in black
walks solemnly on to the
stage, ringing a slow, steady
rhythm on a bell. She is fol-
lowed by 10 more dancers,
also in black. The procession makes its
stately way before the audience and
then suddenly the dancers scatter in all
directions, shouting loudly, striking
menacing martial arts poses, sprinting
across each other’s paths in seemingly
random patterns.
For the next hour, the Cloud Gate
Dance Theatre of Taiwan, making one of
its regular visits to Paris, will continue to
flood the stage of the Théâtre National
de Chaillot with its surges of high-
energy movement, punctuated by
moments of exquisite stillness and
beauty. The rhythms captured in 13
Tongues, a four-year-old work beingperformed for the first time in the west,
are in turns infernal and lyrical. The
dancers move as one body and then bus-
ily disperse into new forms and shapes.
It is hard for a western audience to
grasp every detail in the finely tuned
chaos, and yet the piece receives its cus-
tomary ovation at the end of the show.
Cloud Gate, founded in 1973, makes fre-
quent international tours — next stops
London and Stockholm — to cement its
growing reputation. In 2018 it won the
UK Critics’ Circle National Dance Award
for Outstanding Company, and there
wasn’t a spare seat in the house on its
first night in Paris.
This is a crucial transitional year for
the Taiwanese company. Its artistic
director and founding spirit, Lin Hwai-
min, retired last year and has handed
over to his protégé, Cheng Tsung-lung,FEBRUARY 22 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 20/2/2020 - 17: 22 User: adrian.justins Page Name: WKD12, Part,Page,Edition: WKD, 12, 1