WHAT HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT
MOON WATER
 
Moon Water presents a distinct and mature Chinese choreographic language. The importance of this evolution in Asian dance is no less profound than the impact of Forsythe's Ballett Frankfurt on European classical ballet.
 
--Dance Europe
Mr. Lin has accomplished what creative artists rarely success in doing today: challenging the audience with a work unlike any other.

The tour de force is the way Mr. Lin has extended and transformed the movement of tai chi exercises into an expressive dance vocabulary. Unexpectedly, this syncretic fusion of a codified Asian movement vocabulary with Bach's Baroque dance forms is a perfect fit.

A special experience in the theater.
 
--The New York Times
The arrestingly beautiful Moon Water by Taiwanese choreographer, Lin Hwai-min, is not only the best work of dance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, it is among the best pieces of the year.
 
--The New York Sun
In Moon Water, Bach's cello suites and Lin Hwai-min's Tai Chi blend together as if they had waited for each other for hundreds of years.
 
--Ballet International
Moon Water is a dream of a show, one of the most ravishing things I've seen in a theatre, an experience of beauty . . .

Gripped at the start, then lulled into enchantment . . .

[The dancers] have such stringent, elastic control that they can suddenly blast upwards into high, light jumps that for a moment you fancy might not come down again. The grace of it is, in a way, balletic, but its evasion of the norms of gravity, its total fluidity, suggests that there is a new book of the human dancing body waiting to be written with t'ai chi training.
 
--The Daily Telegraph, London
A deeply beautiful work that makes you appreciate all the praise heaped on Lin Hwai-min as choreographer and artistic director of this outstanding company from Taiwan.
 
--The Sydney Morning Herald
In Moon Water, which the festival should put on its ‘must’list, ideas of illusion and reality were evoked in the decor and in the extreme fluidity of the dance idiom.
 
--The New York Times
A wonderful image from which to leave this deeply engaging and rewarding work, as . . . audiences clearly demonstrated with the most sustained applause in the [Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts] Festival's dance program.
 
--The Australian
One of the most beautiful moments . . . one hears only the water ripple over the edge of the apron. At this point, together with the dancers, one has arrived. Nature has taken possession of the opera stage and all tragic entanglements have come to an end.
 
--Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin
Never in the more than 20 years of its existence did the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre get so close to the original meaning of their name than with their production, Moon Water. Johann Sebastian Bach virtually entered Asia through the Cloud Gate.

Their performance will serve as [Cloud Gate Dance Theatre's] benchmark to be artistically matched. To keep up with a standard thus set will not be easy. To exceed it is almost impossible.
 
--Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The 70-minute production is a sublime ascetic spectacle with a spiritual dimension. [The dancers'] concentration, clarity of purpose and control are exemplary, and their physical plasticity extraordinary. Rather than merely duplicating Bach's tempi and tones, they reach inside his music from the core of their own bodies.
 
--The Times, London
70 minutes of seduction . . . The body is the dancer's instrument . . . and such a gathering of finely tuned instruments is not often seen on a Norwegian stage.
 
--Aftenposten, Oslo
By translating and metamorphosing the essence of traditional Chinese physical exercise into a blend of dance and theatre, [Lin Hwai-min] has created yet another milestone in the development of 20th century dance.

At the end of the piece, it was a while before the audience dared to break the silence with applause, having been witness to a performance of rare beauty.
 
--The Arts Magazine, Singapore
Moon Water reflects the relationship between appearance and essence, effort and effortlessness, man and woman. It is a strikingly beautiful and lyrical piece. Within its 70-minute duration, a unique cosmos unravels where a completely different feeling of time reigns.

The entire stage is transformed into a mirrored cabinet. Reality and appearance melt inseparably into each other. In an unforgettable final image, the dancers seem to move as though on clouds in a celestial landscape—magically removed from all worldliness.

There is nothing this season to compare with its sublime beauty.
 
--Ballet International
Never before has Berlin seen such a harmonious dance performance. The dancers' movements were of such peaceful and serene beauty that one could even doubt that they have bodies.
 
--Berliner Zeitung am Sonntag
Cloud Gate Dance Theatre invites us to see Bach's music as no one has seen it before. In their dancing, West and East meet and mix and two parts of the world open up to renew and reinforce each other . . . The performance is in many ways a purification of body and soul.
 
--Dagbladet, Oslo
 
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