Rising Tides
World-renowned dance theatre’s show offers intense taste of Taiwan
Lin Lee-Chen is a creative firebrand whose work with her Legend Lin Dance Theatre has seen her recognized as one of the world’s most significant choreographers by the Franco- German TV network ARTE.
Since founding her company in 1995, Lin has played a key role in exposing the distinct and forwardthinking movement arts of Taiwan globally and at home is revered as a living master.
The Eternal Tides is a multi-part piece that looks at the history, geography and beauty of Taiwan through a performance fusing cultural and musical elements from Aboriginal, Chinese and other cultures into a visual spectacular. The piece is intense, physical, hyper-visual, and certain to generate strong emotional responses.
The Eternal Tides makes its Canadian debut at the 2018 PuSh International Festival of Performing Arts as a co-presentation with Taiwanfest, supported by the Ministry of Culture, Taiwan and Taiwan Academy.
Lin’s first new piece since 2010, The Eternal Tides played to packed houses last year in Taipei.
“I try to extract experiences from life into my dance and reflect the constantly changing environment around me in all of my work, so each piece is quite different even if sometimes there is some continuity,” said Lin.
“In the last work there was a white bird at the end of it which died. Now it is coming back to life after an incredible amount of effort and struggle. Life comes from determination.”
Determination is something that has defined Lin’s work from the onset. Born in 1950 in Taiwan, the graduate of the Chinese Culture University Department of Dance produced performances with as many as 100 performers as a dance teacher at Chang-An Girls’ Junior High in her 20s. There were shelves of awards and accolades bestowed upon her solo work. Yet at the peak
of her fame, she retired to devote her time to family matters.
She returned to work with her own company with the goal of revitalizing and reaffirming Taiwanese culture in what she perceived as an increasingly westernized artistic landscape. The body of work she built upon returning contained a signature blend of literary, environmental and hybridized movements that brought her even greater renown.
For all its moments of vigorous physicality, there is an equal amount of silence in her choreographic approach in The Eternal Tides. Is this a reflection of a calm evening view of the sea?
“I don’t care to explain how it might relate to my interest in observation, ritual or spirituality, but I will say that the silence is a way to ask the audience to volunteer to enter a different place,” Lin said.
“Formulating the whole piece took a long time — from selecting the right dancers, to bringing in Hsu Ching-chwen as a vocalist. She is a very well-known singer, but not that many knew that she did things outside of popular music and her input to making the piece work was key.”
Incorporating live singing and drumming with the dancers gave The Eternal Tides multiple levels right from the moment it clicked in rehearsals. Lin contributed the Chinese choreography and worked extensively with lighting designer Cheng kuo-yang to arrive at the stunning appearance of the piece.
“All of the elements had to come together to meet that moment where there could be a suspension of time and space,” said Lin.
“I never wanted the where and when specified in the work, hoping that everyone could cross that boundary and be somewhere else entirely. It’s not a story, it’s fragments of myself expressed.”
The first movement is meditative and hypnotic, while the second is explosive and violent. Lin’s fragments come from opposite extremes. The dancers are all comfortable expressing these as they train in what Lin calls “Legend Lin dance style,” which includes aspects of ballet, modern dance, martial arts and sport. She chooses company members looking for a specific “something ” that suits her vision.
“Some come from dance backgrounds, others from engineering and science, everything,” she said. “Then they come to me and get trained into shape. It’s very, very intense and all of them have had their bodies changed through the training.”
To call the dancers fit doesn’t do them justice.
Lin says that when she picks company members she can see where they will be in two years or 10 years’ time, and her training methods are designed with that in mind.
Besides presenting The Eternal Tides, Lin will give local artists an opportunity to experience some of her movement methodology in a hands-on workshop Poetry in Motion (Feb. 4, 1 p.m. at Scotiabank Dance Centre), as well as an artist talk at 3:30 p.m.
Before her arrival, director Singing Chen’s film The Walkers, documenting Lin’s four decades of dance artistry, screens at Vancity Theatre on Jan. 23, at 6:30 p.m.