The beauty of calligraphy becomes movement in a performance that sees the return to the Barcelona stage of who has been considered as Asia’s leading contemporary dance company.
Cloud Gate (雲門, yún mén), the oldest Chinese dance, gives its name to a Taiwanese company founded in 1973 that was the first to introduce contemporary dance to the Chinese speaking community. This is all thanks to the maestro Lin Hwai-min, an exceptional choreographer who based his work on meditation, the practice of internal martial arts (based on mental and spiritual elements) of qi gong (Moon Water, seen at the 2007 Grec Festival) or in Chinese calligraphy, which inspired Wild Cursive, seen at the 2010 Barcelona Summer Festival. This year’s choreography, Pine Smoke, is in fact the second part of Cursive: A Trilogy, a creation whose true protagonists are rice paper and ink. The title of the choreography refers to the smoke produced when pine wood is burnt, which is used to make an especially tone-rich black ink. Fascinated by the way in which the ink flows over the paper, the maestro Lin transforms the bodies of his dancers into lines drawn on the stage with an imaginary brush. In this way, through movement, he explores the different tonalities of black that appear when creating a text using calligraphy. All this, set to the sound of an unusual music: brought to the piece by the compositions of a particularly avant-garde American artist, much revered in sound experimentation: John Cage. Incredible, surprising, flowing... Some of the words used by audiences who have already seen the show to describe the movements of the company’s dancers as they reveal a flexibility and control out of this world to bring us a vision of beauty from an eastern perspective. Yet further proof of Lin Hwai-min’s talent, a legendary figure in contemporary dance who, pay attention, has announced he will be retiring as the company’s artistic director at the end of 2019 and, therefore, will be saying farewell with this piece to the Barcelona stage at the Grec Festival.
A co-production of the National Performing Arts Center - National Theater & Concert Hall.
Pine Smoke was commissioned by the Yong Lin Foundation.
This piece premièred on 30 August 2003, at the National Theater, Taipei (Taiwan).
This tour is made possible in part by the grants from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Taiwan).
In cooperation with Taipei Cultural and Economic Office in Spain.
