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Choreography
Lin
Hwai-min
Performed to
J.S. Bach solo
cello suites
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Sadler's
Wells
28
May - 1 June 2002 |
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To the strains
of Bach's Cello Suites the Cloud Gate
ensemble perform a slow and extraordinarily
poised dance version of Tai Chi, the
exercise routine based on infinitely
slow martial arts movements. The physical
control they display is miraculous,
and many of the poses and attitudes
of Tai Chi, and the closely related
Chinese opera gestures which appear
here too, are beautiful.
There
are two states of mind this performance
can induce in an observer. One is a
kind of trance, which the mesmeric evolutions
and extraordinary strength and balance
of the dancers induce as if by hypnosis.
The other, at least after ten minutes
of fascination at the whole-body dexterity
of the dancers, is ennui; for the music
and the movements are repetitive, painstaking,
without evolution, without narrative,
simply a long repeating sequence of
the same patterns and movements, seamlessly
and relentlessly unfolding into each
other and back again, like a stuck record.
For the
second kind of observer the seventy-minute
performance might just be becoming unbearable
when, about fifteen minutes from the
end, a suddenly brilliant innovation
occurs: the stage slowly fills with
water, and the movements of the dancers
raise occasional fans of spray, and
make lovely melodic wet sounds, and
the repetition of movement changes into
an almost static version of synchronised
swimming in the quarter-inch sheen of
damp as the dancers one by one lie down
and go into a fitful sleep atop their
reflections.
A sceptic
of the ennui tendency might say that
the performance differs little from
what one sees in a Chinese park early
every morning, with platoons of elderly
self-immersed Tai Chi devotees iterating
their motions among the trees. To unfamiliar
eyes a dance version of this must seem
very novel; but Lin Hwai-min, the choreographer,
has not added much to the standard routine
of the Chinese parks, other than the
Bach and the length of the activity
(not even in the parks do they keep
at it this long). In Cloud Gate's version,
the neutrality and apparent arbitrariness
of the Tai Chi routine remains, albeit
leavened by the moonlit beauty of the
dancers; but even this is sexless and
chaste, the young men with beautifully
sculpted, unawakened, automatic bodies,
and the girls with the breastless torsos
of children and the flawlessly coached
movements of the hypnotised, seeming
bland and passionless.
With
so much talent and possibility in this
ensemble, though, one wonders what they
could do with choreography that roused
them from their slumbers.
AC Grayling |
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