International Dance Day 2013: Message from Lin Hwai-min

Lin Hwai-min (photo ©LIU Chen-hsiang)

It is said in the Great Preface of "The Book of Songs,"

an anthology of Chinese poems dating from the 10th to the 7th century BC:

"The emotions are stirred and take form in words.

If words are not enough, we speak in sighs.

If sighs are not enough, we sing them.

If singing is not enough, then unconsciously

our hands dance them and our feet tap them."

Dance is a powerful expression. 

It speaks to earth and heaven.

It speaks of our joy, our fear and our wishes.

Dance speaks of the intangible, yet reveals the state of mind of a person and 

the temperaments and characters of a people.

Like many cultures in the world, the indigenous people in Taiwan dance in circle. 

Their ancestors believed that evils would be kept out of the circle. 

With hands linked, they share the warmth of each other and move in communal pulses. 

Dance brings people together. 

And dance happens at the vanishing point.

Movements disappear as they occur. 

Dance exists only in that fleeting instant. 

It is precious. It is a metaphor of life itself.

In this digital age, images of movements take millions of forms. 

They are fascinating.

But, they can never replace dance because images do not breathe. 

Dance is a celebration of life.

Come, turn off your television, switch off your computer, and come to dance. 

Express yourself through that divine and dignified instrument, which is our body.

Come to dance and join people in the waves of pulses. 

Seize that precious and fleeting moment.

Come to celebrate life with dance.

Lin Hwai-min,
Artistic Director, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan and Cloud Gate 2

The International Theatre Institute (ITI) is pleased to announce that the celebration of International Dance Day 2013 will take place Monday April 29th, 2013 at Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, starting at 8 pm. The Taiwanese choregrapher Lin Hwai-min, author of this year's message, and his company Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taïwan are the guests of the 2013 edition of International Dance Day. They will perform extracts from their works at the occasion. In 1982 the Dance Committee of the ITI founded International Dance Day to be celebrated every year on 29 April, anniversary of Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810), the creator of modern ballet. The intention of the International Dance Day Message is to celebrate Dance, to revel in the universality of this art form, to cross all political, cultural and ethnic barriers and bring people together with a common language – Dance.

Every year, a prominent choregrapher and/or dancer is selected to write a message about Dance and its importance in our societies. Translated in more than twenty languages, the message is circulated through the ITI network (more than 90 national Centres and cooperating members) and performing arts organizations, starting from April. Time magazine talks of Lin Hwai-min as one of "Asia's heroes". Founder of the companies  Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taïwan and Cloud Gate 2, the choregrapher's work has been internationaly acclaimed.

Cloud Gate 2 debuts in New York

Taiwan's Cloud Gate 2 takes pains to clarify its identity: not Cloud Gate Junior, not Cloud Gate Lite. Although also led by Lin Hwai-Min, who founded and directs the famed Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, Cloud Gate 2 tackles the work of Taiwan's young innovators. The New York stop on its international tour--The Joyce Theater now through Sunday--features five works by four compatriots. While these are not brand new pieces--the most recent ones premiered in 2009--they serve as a good introduction to this strong, striking troupe.

Huang Yi's Wicked Fish (2009) had me from hello and, I'll admit, spoiled me for what came after in this roughly two-hour evening. A more seamless, perfect marriage of movement and dancers--let alone dancers and lighting--I cannot imagine. With nothing hokey, obvious or the least bit tentative, Huang and lighting designer Lee Chien-chang evoke a deep sea world of darkness and sudden, mysterious illumination, of increasingly swift, fluent motion. The ensemble--thirteen dancers including Huang--exhibits potent technique, guts and believability. This work leaves me astonished, once again, at how the human body can transform to make art, how the energy of the body can transform to make magic(k).

Huang Yi's whimsical Ta-Ta For Now, set to a Khachaturian violin concerto, opens with the image of a guy tying his shoelaces and pedaling his floating feet like an astronaut in free fall. I really want to see what follows here--a quintet of dancers perched and rhythmically, goofily interacting across a row of folding chairs--back-to-back with Camille A. Brown's The Groove to Nobody's Business, although Huang serves up his own clever, cutesy groove. He's a confident artist, an audacious one, and I want to see more of what he's got up his sleeve.

Tantalus (2000), by the late Wu Kuo-chu, turns its eight dancers into what appears to be a tribe of meerkats with a serious case of the twitchees and an inclination towards slapstick. The Passage (2000), a lusciously surreal sextet by Bulareyaung Pagarlava, plays with dreamily, effortlessly shifting costumes and simulated nudity. As with Cheng Tsung-lung's The Wall (2009), which appears stuffed with and distended by every movement idea that the choreographer could imagine, lengthiness quickly diminishes virtue. Both pieces, however, make the ensemble look fantastic--and vice versa.

Cloud Gate 2 appears again at the The Joyce on Friday night at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm and 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Joyce Theater
Eight Avenue and 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)