Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Handsome, isn’t it? No surprises there. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, celebrating its 50th birthday this year, didn’t make its British debut until 1999 but immediately established a reputation for memorable, visually arresting productions that fuse east and west.
Lunar Halo, which had its UK premiere at a packed Sadler’s Wales on Thursday, is by former Cloud Gate dancer Cheng Tsung Iung, who took over from founding artistic director Lin Hwai Min three years ago. The 70-minute piece uses 13 dancers (seven male, six female) and seeks to explore “the invisible hand of all-powerful big data”. Cue Jam Wu’s huge smartphone screens which descend from the flies at intervals depicting weather systems and a giant human figure (Yeh Po-Sheng) who dwarfs the dancers scuttling around at his feet.
The “lunar halo” of the title is a meteorological phenomenon whereby light is reflected through ice crystals high in the atmosphere to create a ghostly glow around the Moon. Lighting is always a major player in any Cloud Gate production but there are few direct references to the halo in Shen Po-hung’s design, which dramatises the space, imprisoning the ensemble in the tight beam of a down spot or liberating them in a wash of golden syrupy sidelight. The dancers spend much of the time flaunting their abs in minimal fleshings, but Chen Shao-yen’s wardrobe of wonky skirts and shredded trousers enhances the dance in glowing shades of gold, silver and bronze.
The soundtrack is a collage of pieces by Icelandic “post-rock” combo Sigur Rós stitched together with new material. The more lyrical passages are suggestive of a chorister trapped in the wind chimes but the beefier sections give Cheng’s dancemaking plenty to play with, the ensemble surrendering to the thunderous bass line while a soloist performs a glacial soliloquy to the miaow of the top notes.
Cloud Gate’s trademark “blended training” — everything from tai chi to hip-hop — produces dancers of remarkable strength and versatility but Cheng does not make full use of their gifts. He peaks early with the opening segment in which the seven men spoon into a tight conga line, each cupping the elbows of the man in front so that their heads, arms and elbows create a scary, alien organism. An extended passage to the eerie tinkle of a celesta is another highlight in which Fan Chia-hsuan stress-tests joints and sinews, her limbs and spine twisting every which way like a life-sized lay figure.
Cheng’s movement language magpies freely from any number of disciplines, which ought to guarantee variety, but his ritualistic ensembles and slo-mo solos are oddly monotonous. Even the freakish, limbo-dancing backbends grow wearisome after a while and there is enough hair-dancing for a conditioner commercial.
Cloud Gate’s tireless dancers contrive to alchemise the less inspired passages into something rich and strange but one misses the big ideas of earlier works. Cheng’s (actually rather trite) thesis — “the intense contrast and dialogue between [the] body and this digital world” — never quite makes it from page to stage.
★★★☆☆
To December 2, sadlerswells.com
