LIN'S DANCE COMES FULL CIRCLE

Amid the darkness of one of the spacious theaters inside the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing on Nov 14, Lin Hwai-min stands on one side of the stage while staring at the video being screened on the backdrop.

The video is a montage showing running water flowing through stones, which serves as the background of Lin's choreographic work, Autumn River, set to be staged that night.

"It is my last creation. I gathered five veteran Cloud Gate dancers for this piece. Two of them are 50 years old and will retire after this dance. As will I," says the 72-year-old Lin, who, on Dec 31 will step down as artistic director of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre－a position he has held since 1973, when he founded Cloud Gate as the first modern dance company for Chinese-speaking communities.

The 30-minute piece was inspired by Lin's trip to Japan, where he saw a river in a suburban area of Kyoto and red leaves floating on the quietly flowing water. It premiered at the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre in Taiwan in 2015, but has not been staged since then.

Lin decided to present the piece once more as his final curtain call, along with two choreographers, Cheng Tsung-lung, who will succeed Lin to take the reins of the company, and Tao Dance Theater founder, Tao Ye, who exchanged roles in each other's troupes to produce two new pieces: Multiplication and 12.

Premiering in October in Kaohsiung, and titled Exchange, the three pieces are currently on a nationwide tour－with shows in Shanghai, Hangzhou of Zhejiang province and Nanjing of Jiangsu province－and will run through the middle of December.

According to Lin, the idea of Exchange came about in 2017, when Tao and his dance troupe performed in Taipei.

While chatting over a cigarette outside the theater, Tao asked Cheng to choreograph a piece for his dancers in Beijing. While nodding his head, Cheng suggested that Tao reciprocate.

"I heard the idea and I was filled with anticipation to see how they challenged themselves by creating new work with a different troupe of dancers. Because of their hectic schedule, they only had one month for the project," says Lin. "Each of them choreographed a 30-minute piece, but for a show, it's not enough. So I presented my Autumn River.

"After I watched their productions, I told myself 'it's really the time to retire'," Lin adds.

Cheng and Tao share a lot in common regarding their approach to art. In August, Cheng spent four weeks in Tao's dance studio, which is located in Beijing's northeast suburbs.

He observed the dancers' daily training, communicated with them like friends, sharing their stories, before starting his choreography.

He conducted improvisational practices for the dancers and "when I threw an idea out to them, they replied with different physical movements, which grew into different directions like tree branches", Cheng says.

"I named the piece Multiplication because the piece was born out of rounds of discussion and contains rich dance vocabularies," says Cheng, who studied dance since the age of 8 and graduated from the dance department of Taipei National University of the Arts in 2002.

Born into a poor family in Taipei, Cheng, 44, helped his family's small shoe business by selling slippers on the streets from a young age. The dynamics of street life later became the source of inspiration for Cheng's choreography.

In his piece, Multiplication, nine dancers, led by dancer-choreographer Duan Ni, who danced with Akram Khan Company in the United Kingdom and the New York-based company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, move in circles onstage with each one of them dancing in their own way.

Tao, who is known for naming his dance productions by the number of dancers featured in them, named the piece 12 because he worked with 12 dancers from Cloud Gate Dance Theater in Taipei.

Each of the dancers press themselves close to the floor frequently for turns and twists, which fade in and fade out. It was an idea inspired by the movement of clouds which Tao spent four hours observing during a trip to northern Europe a few years ago.

"I was attracted to the clouds above me, which moved and changed quickly. It was a great experience of getting close to nature," says Tao, who was born and raised in Chongqing and began training in Chinese classical dance at 12. He founded his Tao Dance Theater in 2008. "If the floor, like the sky, was a canvas, the dancers would move like clouds," he adds.

He notes that the dancers of Cloud Gate Dance Theater have solid techniques. "To me, Cloud Gate is a model of contemporary dance, a troupe that speaks through its productions."

The training approach of the two companies are basically similar, which made the "exchange" easier than he had expected. The dancers of Cloud Gate receive training in areas like meditation, qigong, an ancient breathing exercise, and martial arts. For Tao, he trained his dancers to explore the possibility of physical movements on the basis of circling.