Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. - BAM Opera House, Brooklyn, New York - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Jan, 1996 by Robert Greskovic

The program note for Nine Songs, Lin Hwai-min's two-act spectacle of dance theater, tells us that in Chinese "nine" means "many" rather than a specific number. Many, many things happen in Lin's dance drama, which calls on the methods of both contemporary modern dance and ancient Chinese dance to present a visual poem telling of benign and evil forces, old and new. So many, in fact, that as the two-hour-or-so production proceeded, I began to wonder about the Chinese for kitchen sink."

The episodic activity of Nine Songs, inspired in part by the 2000-year-old poetry of Qu Yuang, takes place on a stage decorated by Ming Cho Lee. Flats painted with gigantic lotuses frame the space like a movable folding screen; a simulated lotus pond (real water and fake flora) edges the front of the stage. The cast of characters runs a wide gamut from a bicycle-riding businessman to a shrouded goddess bearing a flowering staff. The music comes from multiple Asian sources - Tibet, India, Japan, and Taiwan.

Lin's choreographic mentors appear to be Martha Graham, Pina Bausch, Maurice Bejart, and Moses Pendleton, as well as, I suppose, Chinese theater individuals unfamiliar to me. The first half of his spectacle means to proceed from morning to night; the second, through the four seasons. Little of this happens with notable finesse. What you might expect to evolve like the passing light of day comes and goes in blocklike segments.

The action of the first half animates opaquely ritualistic tableaux with declamatory moves of a numbing sameness. The second half, not much more lucid as drama, has a little more variety. Something of a coup de theatre surfaces when Wang Chiang-mei as the Goddess of the Xiang River dominates the stage trailing a seemingly endless white veil, manipulated and arranged at one point like Robert Smithson's postmodern earth work called Spiral Jetty.

Dancers portraying past and recent victims of brutal political suppression also enter the mix. A denouement called Honoring the Dead' comes in the form of a tediously protracted procession with votive candles, recycling Gerald Arpino's Trinity with Bejart's Messe pour le temps present. The flickering flames are eventually amassed into a golden, snaking road that appears to pierce the infinity of starlit outer space. The winding route struck me as a monument to the program's nebulous long haul.