Dance repertoire aims to reveal innermost truths
THERE are no language barriers when it comes to dance – but it’s a different matter when it comes to the names of dance theatre companies. According to Chinese choreographer Tao Ye, his company – which we know in the West as Tao Dance Theatre – should really be called “Tao Body Theatre”. As soon as you see his dancers in motion, as part of next week’s Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) programme, you’ll understand why he says that. For everything Tao Ye does in his choreography starts with the body: not merely the physical potential of the flesh and blood form, but also its innermost state of being and the truths that life experience can bring to creative processes.
A case in point is the way the commute from home to studio became a starting point for Weight x 3, the triptych of two duets and a solo that opens the company’s double bill at the Royal Lyceum Theatre. Every day, the unavoidable journeying took at least four hours, but as this routine coming and going took on a kind of familiarity – recurring landmarks signifying stages in time passing – so the very act of covering the same ground over and over began to feel like a meditation in motion. For Tao Ye, the effect of this prolonged repetition shaded into a choreography where the looping and re-iterating of movement patterns answered the rhythms in his choice of music by Steve Reich.
A meeting of two minimalist minds – only Tao Ye hadn’t come across the Western concepts of minimalism when he made the piece. He’d heard the music, responded to it without any referential baggage, and has seemed totally disinclined to fit himself or his work into the cultural niches that exist in Europe, America or Australia – continents where his company has toured to rapturous acclaim. So – would Tao Ye define himself as a 21st century Chinese choreographer? That line doesn’t seem to fit either. Categories invite pre-conceptions, impose limitations, stunt creativity: Tao Ye has no truck with artificial boundaries – and indeed prefers not to attach a nationality to his artistic identity.
Perhaps that’s because he is increasingly uncomfortable with how current directions in China’s dance-making are veering towards the spectacular and the commercial – lots of showbiz glitz, but at the expense of technique and rigour. Finding dancers who can fulfil his own choreographic demands has, he says, become harder and harder. Even when a potential candidate turns up, the induction in the way of Tao Ye can take a whole year, maybe even two before they can perform in a work like 5, the other piece that EIF audiences will see on-stage. In it, five dancers become as one in a constantly re-aligning entity that sees bodies jigsawing into new shapes without ever breaking physical contact. It demands more than an acutely disciplined flexibility, or the stamina to sustain and support uncanny balances. It requires a mindset that sees the intensity and beauty of the integrated whole, rather than the obvious prowess of the individual.
For some, this degree of focus has a spiritual quality that transcends showmanship and Tao Ye’s work is often described as being somewhere between a poem and a prayer. It is, nonetheless, grounded in a background of formidable dance training that began in his childhood with Chinese traditional forms, moved on into Western ballet and included time spent with some of China’s leading contemporary groups. That amalgam of techniques didn’t, however, answer his inner sense of what he wanted his dance to be – a non-verbal way of expressing himself that had an energy beyond simply following in the footsteps of someone else’s ideas.
So, in 2008 when he was just 22, Tao Ye founded his own company and began on the numerical progression of mesmerising pieces that now form a highly idiosyncratic repertoire. His dances are tagged by numbers because – like the misrepresentation lurking in his company name – to lay down a title is to invite expectations or influence reactions.
Tao Ye prefers that his work is like a stimulus to an audience’s own imagination, a freeing up of inner impulses where a movement triggers visions that are personal and relevant and possibly revelatory. In the way that meditation invites the calm that loosens off the stresses and restraints of every-day life, so Tao Ye’s exquisite choreographies are an oasis of unhurried grace and hypnotic beauty. On-stage, his fiercely pliant dancers devote their limbs to a physical calligraphy that – whatever language you speak – can be read as an ode to life, and as a visionary journey through the realms of movement. Tao Dance Theatre is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh on August 17 and 18.