Performing Arts

Crossing Cultures 101

• Byline:SARAH BROOKS
• Publication Date:12/01/1992

Taiwan's top dance institute has teamed up with one of the best-known U.S. university dance crops to put a multiethnic spin on an essentially Chinese work.

Crossing the Black Water, one of the most renowned dances by Taiwan choreographer Lin Hwai-min (林懷民), has been performed hundreds of times locally and abroad since it was created in 1978. Tell­ing the story of the early mainland Chi­nese pioneers who crossed the formidable Taiwan Straits several hundred years ago, it is a dance that connects the people of Taiwan with their Chinese heritage and their past.

But the dance became something more than a Taiwanese story when it was performed last summer. The faces of the dancers who surged across the stage, heaving back and forth with the intense communal energy for which the dance is known, were not just Chinese. This time, the boat carried Caucasians, Hispanics, and blacks as well.

On board were students from Tai­pei's National Institute of the Arts (NIA) and from the Purchase Dance Corps of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase. The two groups performed to­gether at the 1992 International Festival of Dance Academies, held in Taipei last July. The joint effort added a multi­cultural dimension to a dance that has generally been viewed as essentially Chinese; it is an excerpt of the full-evening dance, Legacy (薪傳), the sig­nature work of Lin's Taipei-based Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.

"This is everyone's story, it's not just a Chinese story," says Tsuai Wen-lin (崔雯玲), a Taiwan student at SUNY-Pur­chase who helped to teach the dance to her classmates. "Every country can have this experience."

The cooperative performance also served to bridge cultural gaps between the two groups of dancers and was a high point in a series of exchanges between the two dance schools, over the past few years. "I thought it was just amazing that we could come together from two worlds apart, says Carol Walker, dean of dance at SUNY-Purchase. "I think [the Purchase students] gained a tremendous respect for another culture." She adds that the joint venture was, "the most amazing way in the world to learn history."

Walker, whose dance department is considered among the top in the United States, first saw Crossing the Black Water at the 1988 International Festival of Dance Academies in Hong Kong. She was deeply moved by the work and the NIA students who performed it, especially "the vitality and the energy and the training of the dancers." Walker met Lin Hwai-min again in 1990 in New York and was further in­spired by a series of talks he gave on his philosophy as a choreographer. It was then that she asked for permission to perform Crossing the Black Water.

Lin agreed, but not without hesita­tion. He had already turned down several requests from other schools and dance companies because he was not sure if an outside group could grasp the true spirit of the work. "Not only because it's a Tai­wanese story," he explains, "but because it takes such great energy and concentra­tion." Lin adds that the dance contains "a spirit and high-voltage energy that are essential to the work."

But Lin decided to give Purchase a chance. He sent videos of the work together with notes and movement counts. NIA then shipped the costumes and the huge white silk sheet—a trademark of the dance—used to create the arresting illusion of both the pioneers' boat and the rolling, churning ocean that nearly de­vours them. Auditions for the cast were supervised by Tsuai Wen-lin and Hsu Tzyy-yann (許子雁), two former members of Cloud Gate. The choices, Walker recalls, were made more on a sense of inner strength than technique. "They had to see the guts of the person," Walker says. Dancers were evaluated on whether they "measured up to the dynamic demands of the piece," she explains.

Tsuai and Hsu then taught their fel­low students the dance, and Lin Hwai-min arrived to oversee the final weeks of re­hearsals. The Purchase Dance Corps first presented the work at the university's Performing Arts Center in April 1991. They received a standing ovation. Several months later, they performed at a festival in Amsterdam, then teamed up with NIA last summer in Taipei.

For Lin Hwai-min, seeing American students perform one of his best-known works was a new experience and perhaps a test of how far the dance's power could extend. Watching the first performance, he remembers it felt odd during the opening boat scene, to see a young black man leading the other dancers. What had always been a Chinese group was now a mix of many races. "But as soon as they entered the stage," Lin says, "you forgot about the skin color of the dancers."

According to Carol Walker, many of the audience members at the first performances were deeply moved by the dance, especially those belonging to minority groups. Some were even moved to tears. Many of the dancers also reacted emotionally to the work. Walker remembers the response of Gregory Livingston, an African-American student who now dances with the City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong. "He said his people have spent their entire history looking for a place," says Walker. "He found tremendous meaning in this work."

Not all students formed such an im­mediate sense of relationship to the work. For example, Purchase dancer Michael Martin, an African-American who will join U.S.-based Dance Brazil company after graduation, remembers his initial response: "It wasn't my culture and I really didn't understand it."

But Martin and others overcame this disadvantage when they learned more about Taiwan through the stories of classmate Tsuai Wen-lin, who helped teach the dance. She told them how her father fled to Taiwan from war-tom China, leaving behind his loved ones, and shared an emotional childhood memory of seeing her mother wail and crawl on the ground in a traditional mourning ritual at her grand­ father's funeral. This last memory perhaps gave the dancers a feel for the Chinese heritage that the dance draws upon.

"All of us have something in our heritage that we can relate to this dance," Walker says. The theme of leaving one's home behind and struggling to survive in a new place is an experience understood by people everywhere, she explains; even the experience of students coming to Purchase is relevant, or the experience of being a dancer and continually facing new physical and emotional challenges.

For Michael Martin, who performed Crossing the Black Water both at Purchase and in Taipei, a greater under­ standing came from Lin Hwai-min. He recalls what Lin told the dancers at a rehearsal: "I don't want you to think of go­ing to Taiwan. I want you to think about wherever it is you want to go. You're traveling and you have left your parents behind; you want to move on, but you love your family. There is constant pull to go forward and to go back."

This last image is also an apt descrip­tion of the actual movement of much of the dance. There is an intense, almost relentless, forward-backward, push-pull as the dancers cross the stage en masse, ploughing onward in their small boat, exalted, against the force of the waves; and again when they join in a gargantuan effort to heave one of their men onto the shoulders of the others so that he can re-hoist a broken mast, which he does with a great, climactic shout.

All this takes place in a tight, unified group, in which each person shows un­yielding individual strength yet is com­pletely dependent upon the strength of the others. In fact, the intense interdependence of Crossing the Black Water also presented a considerable challenge to the American dancers, because they are used to a more individualistic approach. In the work, all eighteen or nineteen dancers spend much of their time "not just dancing together but linked together," as Lin describes it. The dancers even breathe together. In fact, they use breathing rather than counting to keep time during the performance. As one Purchase dancer told Walker, "Everything I've danced before was 'me, me, me' and 'find your own space.' In this piece, everything is 'we, we, we' and 'close, close, close.'''

Although the American students had performed other group works, and often must make very close contact while partnering, Walker says they usually experience a sense of physical separation while dancing. And in many modern works, there are opportunities for dancers to express individuality. Not so in Crossing the Black Water. Here the focus is entirely on the group; the emotion is communal. In this piece, Walker says, "there's no room for prima donnas." She recalls how another student described the dance: "You have to breathe each other. You have to feel each other. You have to share sweat."

Some of the Purchase students who performed with NIA this summer were also impressed by the discipline of the Taiwan dancers and by what one of them described as a sense of quiet, inner strength. "They gave us this really mind­-calming energy," one Purchase dancer explains. Hsu Tzyy-yann attributes this quiet discipline to an essential difference in Chinese and American education and upbringing, something to do with obedience versus individuality. "We were al­ways taught that we had to obey the teacher," she explains. "Whereas we're taught," responds Purchase dancer Laurie Hershberger, "that you have to learn the rules, but then you have to try to learn to break the rules."

This summer's cooperative per­formance was part of an ongoing relationship that has developed between the NIA and Purchase dance departments. At the International Festival of Dance Academies, several NIA students also joined the Purchase Dance Corps for a rendition of the well-known 1936 dance Lynchtown, by American choreographer Charles Weidman. And in spring 1991, Purchase loaned NIA the sets and costumes to perform a reconstruction of Bronislava Nijinska's 1923 work, Les Noces. The dance was taught by a former Purchase teacher. Currently, Lo Man-fei (羅曼菲), chair of NIA' S dance depart­ment, is planning to teach one of her works at Purchase for a performance in 1993.

Both schools hope to develop a stu­dent exchange program. One Purchase dancer has already spent a semester at NIA and the institute is now hoping to get government approval to allow its students to receive credit for studies at Purchase. Walker stresses that the two schools have many similarities; the structure and goals of their programs are similar, and both schools offer professional training pro­grams with a strong emphasis on the humanities. Most importantly, after meeting Lin Hwai-min and other NIA teachers, Walker feels there is a natural affinity between the two schools. Says Walker, "I felt we were really going in the same direction. "—Sarah Brooks is an editor and arts writer based in Taipei. ▪