Lin Hwai-min: Searching For Identity Through Dance

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Lin Hwai-min: Searching For Identity Through Dance

"That evening in Vienna was the coming of age for me. I was relieved. I felt free, as if the effect of Martial Law left in my body had finally been lifted, though 12 years after the Law was officially abolished. And with a new sense of freedom and confidence came different and better works." A keynote address by Lin Hwai-min during the 2006 ISPA Congress in Hong Kong.

When the organizers of the conference invited me to give this speech, I told them I didn't know much about performing arts, I only made a few little dances. Tell us how you made your dances then, they insisted. They are very charming ladies. I was trapped by their charm. Somehow I said yes, and later too late to regret. Please kindly bear with my navel-gazing. And, please forget about the title. It was meant for a longer speech. Now I was told there is only one hour for this session. Therefore, I will not go to the Silk Road, and focus on my little dances.

My downfall with dance began with "The Red Shoes", the famous British ballet film. I saw it for eleven times. After that, I was hooked. I was five and a half. Ten years later, I got to see José Límon in his masterpiece "Moor's Pavane". I was enlightened and decided to be a modern dancer if I ever became a dancer.

I said "if" because I thought I was too old to become a dancer. Moreover, at that time, I was writing and already had my stories published. I loved Chinese literature. But, throughout my adolescent years, it was Salinger, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald who kept me company. In those years, the West meant the best. Tours in Taiwan, going to the U.S. and eventually getting a green card was the goal for many young people. Reading Time magazine was a must for snobbish college students. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez were our idols.

Nevertheless, it took me several years, while studying in the U. S., to realize that "House of the Rising Sun", had nothing to do with revolution, but just the name of a whore house. It dawned on me that most of my understanding about the West was actually an accumulation of misconceptions. I started to ask myself the question: who am I? Then, I found myself equally ignorant about my homeland, Taiwan.

With this awareness, one week after my return to Taiwan, I picked up my backpack again, and went on with an around-the-island trip, trying to get acquainted with my own people and my land – a journey yet to be continued.

In 1973, I founded Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. In naming the company after the oldest known dance in Chinese history, we set out to create works of our own, not imitations of American or European modern dance. As to how, I didn't know, and had to spend the next thirty years looking for an answer.

Some of my early works are reinterpretation on folklores, classical literature, and adaptation of Beijing opera play. One of the examples is "the Tale of the White Serpent". I took the hint of symbolic use of props from the opera and had a set of modern sculpture made of rattan. Movements were molded on dancers whose training includes Beijing opera movement and Graham technique. In the 70's, the word "fusion" was not in yet. I just did what I could with whatever materials were available then.

Narrative works such as "White Serpent" were instant hits. But I soon grew tired with them. Do we have to put on classical robes or playing spirits of serpents in order to be "ourselves"? The answer came when I revisited New York in 1978. Huddling in a small apartment, I was lonely and homesick. I thought of my hometown near the site where Chinese immigrants from the Mainland built their first settlement. I thought of the stories that depict the stormy journey of crossing the Black Water, now the straits of Taiwan.

I decided to do "Legacy" to honor the pioneers of Taiwan, our ancestors. With this thought came a problem: the stylized movement of opera or theatrical vocabularies of Graham technique would not fit the immigrants who were basically poor farmers.

Upon my return to Taiwan, I took the dancers to a riverbed filled with rocks for outdoor training. We fast walked and ran on the rocks. We pushed and carried rocks. In the end we acquired a low weight stance, the typical body of farmers who always bent their bodies to labor on the land. From that position, dancers drew strength from floor and made explosive movements to eat up space, like pioneers claiming the land.

"Legacy" is the first theatrical work that deals with the history of Taiwan. At that time, Taiwan was under Martial Law. To avoid the dangerous association with Taiwan Independence Movement by the government censors, I moved the premiere away from the capital, to a city near my hometown.

By pure coincidence, "Legacy" premiered on the day the United States president Jimmy Carter announced the breakup with Taiwan and the establishment of diplomatic relationship with the People's Republic of China. People in Taiwan felt betrayed. The premiere became a highly emotional event: 6,000 people packed in a stadium. They cheered, cried and strove along with the dancers when the "pioneers" struggling to cross the "Black Water."

With "Legacy", a work deeply rooted in our land and history, I felt I had finally come home. That nice feeling, however, did not last long. A pressing question constantly bugged me:

What is the portrait of us, the present-day Taiwanese?

It was easy to throw away theatrical costumes and peasants' garments. But, once dressed in contemporary fashion, I found it very hard to move.

A flexed hand or foot reminds people of traditional Asian dance. A pointed foot points to the court of Louise the 14th. Contractions evoked Martha Graham. Try to look contemporary? Very well. Yet never arrange the dancers in one line, and have them do arm gestures in unison. That is Pina Bausch's domain. As it turns out, the stage is heavily mined.

It was not until 19 years after "Legacy" was created that I more or less solved the puzzle of how to move on stage in a work that attempts to reclaim the lost memories of Taiwanese. It was called "Portraits of the Families".

Jennifer Dunning, the senior dance critic for the New York Times, once asked me that while most choreographers created works about their families, their father, or their dogs, they created in short, out of their lives, why I often chose to address political issues? I told her that I never thought about political issues, my works merely reflected my own life.

There has been through drastic changes in Taiwan in the past two decades. 1987 saw the lift of the Martial Law. The first direct presidential election took place in 1996. And in 2000, the Nationalist Government that had ruled the island for more than 50 years was voted out from power. With each change, people were empowered new freedom. And information from the past was unearthed. "We are not reviewing our own history," I told Ms. Dunning; "We are discovering and learning about it and about ourselves."

Ideas for "Portraits of the Families" were triggered by old photos of Taiwan. In big cities throughout the world, there are always pictures and postcards of cityscape and people from yesteryears. Not in Taiwan, at least not until 15 years ago.

When I was a little kid, I once discovered my mother's photo album from a closet. Several photos showed her wearing the Japanese kimono, apparently taken before the arrival of the Nationalist Government when Taiwan was still ruled by Japan. Mother looked so beautiful. I was very excited. But my mother simply took it away from me. I never saw the album again.

Under the Martial Law, fear transformed itself into numerous taboos that cast shadow at each turn of life. As Japanese were the enemy of Chinese during the War, my mother was not the only person who thought that anything related to the Japanese era had to be hidden away.

In the early 90s, the folks in my hometown dug out their family collections and held a grand photo exhibition. For the first time in my life, I got to see the faces and major events of my hometown in the past 100 years.

I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I wanted to share it with the people in Taiwan by projecting old photos on the backdrops in my new work. But, what should be the content of the work? I recalled those hushed conversations by the adults in the late evenings which often terrified me in my childhood. I remembered the widow of my father's cousin who disappeared after the massacre, and that her hair turned gray when she was only 30 years old. I decided to tackle the darkest years of Taiwan, about the massacre in 1947 and the White Terror in its aftermath. We interviewed family members of the victims in the massacre, of those who were shot without trials and those who simply disappeared. Their voices in mandarin and different dialects became the soundscape of the work. And, since "Portraits of the Families" was a work about cleansing, I forsook dance technique and had dancers do gestures and movements from everyday life: washing face, washing hair, washing body, washing hands and other simple movements. It took the form of collage, no linear development, no specific roles, while the projected images and voices were so realistic, dance was almost abstract. I was happy with what we had done: the dancers in contemporary clothes looked like people in the street and their movements evoked no resemblance of the western modern dance.

At the premiere, audience was shocked. For the great majority of them, it was their first encounter with such images and voices from the past. History was no longer several lines in words. There was a tension of resistance in the theatre that gradually gave into tears and sobs.

"Portraits of the Families" was meant to be a "family affair," and was never intended for export. Nevertheless, we soon got invitations from festivals in Jerusalem, Vienna and Berlin. I became worried. Few people in the West would know the history of Taiwan and surely nobody could understand the material in the soundscape. And yet it had to be understood! We had all the voices translated and invited people with suitable English accent for each voice to do the recording.

"Portraits of the Families" had its overseas premiere in Jerusalem. Twenty minutes after it had started, I had to leave the theatre. With English echoing in the theatre, the work looked weird and hollow; I could no longer recognize it.

In panic, I called the director of Vienna International Dance Festival and asked her if I could present the un-translated version. No problem, she said. And she would provide English script for those who wanted to know the details.

All set. But, anxiety possessed me again. Wouldn't that mean the work might be misinterpreted or not understood at all. I could not sleep. Then, one night I sat up in my bed. What the heck, I told myself. The Italians never translated the lyrics of Puccini's arias for us, yet that did not stop us from falling in love with Mimi or La Traviata. I decided to stick to the original version.

Still, it turned out to be the most nervous, if not the most scaring, opening night in my life. Ten minutes before curtain, a lighting operator miss-pressed a button on the computer and all the lighting cues disappeared. The performance was delayed. Worse, it happened to be the hottest day in 30 years in Vienna, 38 degree, and there was no air condition in the theatre. Audience waited patiently using program books as fans. Makeup started to melt on beautiful faces. 50 minutes later, computer recalled its memory. . . .

In the steaming heat, the Taiwanese tragedy unfolded smoothly and, at the end, received a rousing standing ovation. Dozens of people even lined up in the backstage to congratulate and thank me. "It was sadly beautiful," they said. "Yes, we understood it perfectly well. We also have our share of darkness in our history," a gentleman told me. "But, it was not confronted in our theatre."

That evening I consumed two bottles of red wine by myself. Deadly drunk, I paced around in my hotel room, weeping and wailing. For years, we strove for creating works that were ours. "Portraits of the Families" did just well.

Why I had felt so insecure about not being understood and accepted? After many years of hard working, shouldn't I be more confident? If I had not reverted to the original version, I might never have known that we could be loved and respected for just being ourselves. That evening in Vienna was the coming of age for me. I was relieved. I felt free, as if the effect of Martial Law left in my body had finally been lifted, though 12 years after the Law was officially abolished. And with a new sense of freedom and confidence came different and better works.

Way back in the 70s, Taiwan saw its first professional production of "Swan Lake" by the Australian Ballet. Audience was thrilled. Coming out of the theatre, people talked with excitement. "But we will never be able to do it," a lady declared aloud, "Our legs are too short." Being young and cocky, I thought, "Of course we can, if we work hard enough. Just wait and see." As I grew older and wiser, I realized that what she said was gospel truth.

In the West, ballet dancers elevate, just like Gothic church attempts to reach the heavens. The Forbidden City in Beijing is very tall, but the emphasis is on its wide spread. Similarly, Tai Chi practitioners move horizontally in circular movements. Indeed, ballet is an art form about lines, longer legs and higher extensions are certainly better off. Since our legs are shorter, I reasoned, why don't we train ourselves in the disciplines created, developed and passed on by people with shorter legs. Starting in the 90s, Cloud Gate dancers have been trained with great emphasis on meditation, martial arts and Tai Chi Tao Yin, an ancient form of Chi Kung, all taught by old masters. In recent years, weekly calligraphy classes are also added to the training program. Instead of invading space, we now internalize our focus and discover a new world: our own bodies. Performing on stage, we no longer project outward to impress the audience. We draw them in by involving them with our breathing. Dance critics in Europe acclaim that Cloud Gate has created a new dance language. In fact, we just happily found ourselves.

When Cloud Gate was young, we never dreamt about international reputation. The company was founded with a very humble purpose: to provide dancers a stage and to share our beloved art with the society, especially the grass roots. Whenever we could, we gave free outdoor performances. In the past ten years, thanks to generous support of Cathay Insurance Company, we gave such performances in four different cities and small towns every year. It attracts 50,000 to 60,000 people for each show, or 30,000 on raining days.

I am greatly indebted to the audience in Taiwan who has encouraged me and supported Cloud Gate for 33 years. And, I love my dancers. Watching them take curtain calls has become the most gratifying moment in my life now. They are always radiant with confidence. There is no shadow, no burden from the past. They are proud of being themselves. For all of these, I feel I am very much blessed.

SPEAKER BIO
Founder and Artistic Director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Mr. Lin is one of the most renowned choreographers in Asia. He blends Chinese cultural elements with Western contemporary dance techniques in his choreography, creating a unique style that prompted the New York Times to acclaim: ''Lin Hwai-min has succeeded brilliantly in fusing dance techniques and theatrical concepts from the East and the West.'' Mr. Lin received the Ramon Magsaysay Award (1999), the so called ''Nobel Prize of Asia,'' an Honorary Award of Fellowship by the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (1997) and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Department of Culture of New York City (1996). As early as in 1983, he was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons in the World by Jaycees International. He is lately chosen as one of Asia's Heroes by TIME Asia in 2005.