Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan is entering its second half century under new management but remains in keeping with the ethereal style developed and refined in its first fifty years under the leadership of Lin Hwai-min. That its performers are like no others stems from their eclectic training, integrating ancient Chinese meditation, martial arts, contemporary dance and ballet: Cheng Tsung-lung (the former Cloud Gate dancer who succeeded Lin in 2020) has extended that repertoire further to encompass various genres of street dance, as evidenced by the use of popping and locking during this work.
Lunar Halo was made in Taiwan (in 2019) but inspired by Iceland since it was on that faraway island that Cheng first saw the astronomical phenomenon that provided the title of this work: the optical illusion of a glowing ring around the moon caused when light reflected from the sun is deflected by the ice crystals within cirrus clouds. It is taken to be a portent of disaster and Cheng is mindful that the work premiered just before the world had its covid shut down.
The Icelandic connection was further intensified by one of that country’s major cultural exports, Sigur Rós, weaving Cheng’s selection of twenty of their songs into a composite score, thus prefacing a new fashion of rock bands in dance continuing this year with Black Sabbath (Birmingham Royal Ballet) and Genesis (New English Ballet Theatre). Who will be next? My money’s on Jethro Tull.
Cheng has declared that Lunar Halo was also motivated by spending hours through the night watching digital content on his smart phone and losing the sense of his own body in the process. High-definition digital imagery is also so fundamental to Lunar Halo that this became a performance on parallel lines: the glacial, moonlit movement of the thirteen dancers on stage in keeping with the title; and the mostly disconnected imagery on the screen, which included dismembered hands reaching out of the stage and rudimentary drawings that morphed into waterfalls.
The most memorable sequence was when the huge image of a naked man on an LED screen descended feet first from the flies to stand like some giant overlooking the Lilliputian dancers below. The real-time film of the nude man was then whitewashed so that he turned into a giant eyeless statue made of clay. It was impactful – like a scene from Jason and the Argonauts or any other Ray Harryhausen film – but also distracted from the dwarfed dance going on below.
It had all started so well. The opening sequence of seven male dancers all linked closely together as if part of a single body by their hands holding the elbows of the fellow in front was in one sense derivative (it’s a movement device used many times from Akram Khan’s Dust to Mongol Khan) but, in this instance, it was cleverly illuminated in Shen Po-hung’s low lighting to suggest that the rolling motion of the dancers’ arms provided the skeletal outline of a huge beast. These seven men – in one big pool of light – were then joined by six women coming from upstage covered by another large spotlight. Cheng’s first work as director was 13 Tongues and so this number, unlucky for some, seems to have a particular relevance to the new director (it also so happens to be the number of countries that still have diplomatic ties to Taiwan).
For 40 minutes, I was in thrall to the glacial beauty of the dancers’ movement; the often-surprising articulation of their bodies (especially in two arresting female solos with astonishing flexibility), the seductive sensuality of their interactions, encouraged by the near-nakedness suggested by tight nude-coloured costumes; and the synchronicity of their tribal rituals. When the dancers appeared to pay homage to the giant naked man/statue it was by bursting into an explosion of frenetic dance with the women’s long, black hair flailing like whips in the darkness.
At this point I was sensing a five-star review but the final part of this 70-minute work descended into a circus of disjointed ideas (the dismembered hands and waterfalls didn’t help) and the dancers’ best efforts floundered in the haze. It seemed like a work that suffered from having one too many inspirations.
