Between Moments

A couple of friends and I went down to the Esplanade Theatre on Wednesday 26th May to catch the 2nd performance of Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre troupe. This latest installation, as it is far more an art installation, than any form of dance, was called WindShadow (Feng ying in Chinese).

If you have caught the introductory sequence to the classic TV series, Twilight Zone, than youd have some idea of what we viewed on Wednesday. There was no music and no “dance”, what the performance amounted to was a series of vignettes, mostly in monochrome, sometimes reminiscent of a Chinese ink painting and at others resonating with the plangency of a repressed nightmare. From Kite flying silhouettes to flag-bedecked Chinese general type figures (dressed like they were extracted from the Matrix) to writhing shadows; it was one bizarre image after another, to a soundtrack composed from heartbeats, crying babies, radio transmissions and other random noises.

I felt vaguely cheated somehow because billing the performance as Dance Theatre does not really capture what it is - aka abstract art in live performance and unfortunately it was mostly abstract art that I didn’t “get”.

However, I was in the minority judging from the enthusiastic applause and bravos at the end. Definitely some strong supporters in the audience….

However, I did like some of the interplay between reality and shadow onstage - basically black-clad dancers (masked in black as well) played the shadows - quite literally dragged onstage by their “real” counterparts. There were interesting plays with tinted mirrors and inspired writhing (the dancers looked like ants under a heat ray at one point). The lighting too kept shifting so that the dancers could include shifting shadows as part of the act.

From what I’ve read, Cloudgate’s choreographer Lin Hwai Min created Wind Shadow from a series of images thrown out by Visual artist Cai Guo-Qiang. This is why the visual art elements dominate at the expense of the narrative. Cai’s gunpowder drawings depicted across a landscape of billowing flags amidst repeated explosions featured prominently at one point.

The special effects were stunning, particularly the green laser vortex drawn on smoke which provided the show’s Grand Finale, but I walked out feeling like the human elements of dance had been sacrificed to a Pollock-style love of random abstract art.