Water Stains on the Wall
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
Dunstan Playhouse
Adelaide Festival of Arts
March
Having entranced audiences with Songs of the Wanderers in 1998 and Cursive 1 in 2007, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre were invited back to the Adelaide Festival of Arts with a new work by Artistic Director and world-renowned choreographer Lin Hwai-Min. Water Stains on the Wall, which premiered in Taiwan in 2010, is not based on calligraphy itself, as was the Cursive trilogy, but on a conversation between two renowned Chinese calligraphers, which according to the program notes, gave rise to the “highest aesthetic of Chinese calligraphy.” Water stains that appear on walls, we are told, result from ‘a long process of natural, organic and fluid evolution’, and they serve as a metaphor for the creative process itself.
The opening sequence has an austere, Zen-like beauty. The entire cast of ten women and seven men stand on a steeply raked white floor, facing forward in front of a black curtain. All are clad alike in white divided skirts with a filmy overlay, the men bare-chested and the women in flesh-coloured leotards. With knees deeply bent, they start walking forward with almost infinitesimal slowness, their breathing audible above Toshio Hosokawa’s score. In unison they sway from side to side until one man starts to sway in the opposite direction, then gradually the dancers break away in singles, pairings and groups.
Lulu W.L. Lee’s lighting and Ethan Wang’s projections wash over the unfolding dance, creating pools of light and darkness that isolate individual and grouped dancers, and spreading black ink stains that seem to seep through the white floor. It is this combination of lighting and projection that creates the imagery of water stains, rather than the movement itself. Lin’s movement vocabulary is a subtle amalgam of t’ai chi, qi gong, contemporary dance and martial arts, and the Cloud Gate dancers are supreme masters of his style. Smooth spirals of movement, originating variously in torso or arms, unravel, arrested by sudden changes of direction. Feet are often inverted or splayed, hands are held with thumbs and second fingers gently touching each other. The choreography makes great use of stillness and contrasts in speed: slowly moving groups are dispersed by a man running swiftly through them; bodies slowly melting to the floor are jumped over with martial leg kicks.
In keeping with its theme of organic development, the work has no distinct sections; rather groupings emerge from each other seamlessly, creating many beautiful moments. Yet at seventy minutes in length, the work feels overly long. This is in part because there is an studious avoidance of personal connection between the dancers themselves, or between the dancers and the audience. There is neither eye contact nor facial expression of any kind; relationships are not developed, so that the work is extremely abstract. This possibly Zen detachment (Lin is a Zen Buddhist), coupled with the sameness of the movement throughout the piece, renders it a curiously cold experience. The previous works I’ve seen by Cloud Gate have shared this cool aesthetic, but in the Cursive trilogy, for example, the visual interest of the calligraphic shapes made by the dancers compensated for the impersonality and inwardness of the dancers’ focus. In Water Stains, though, I felt that the visual interest of the images was not sufficient to hold the attention for the length of the piece, despite the marvellous dancing of Cloud Gate’s magnificent dancers.
- Maggie Tonkin