What Has Been Said About

WHAT HAS BEEN SAID ABOUT
SONG OF THE WANDERERS...

The work moves the audience to tears. . . . A rousing standing ovation.

--Bergens Tidende, Bergen, Norway

The choreographer sends not only his dancers but also his audience into a grand purification ritual not unlike to the trial by fire and water of the young people in Mozart's Magic Flute.

--Ballet International, Germany

. . . if there were no other strong reasons for me to travel to Bergen, this would have been the reason enough.

All the praising words one can say about the originality, the plastic beauty, the human strength and, at the same time, the spiritual delicateness of this show, are too little.

---JL, Lisbon, Portugal

Lin Hwai-min is the most important choreographer in Asia.

---Berliner Morgenpost

It's a vivid pilgrimage of suffering and survival to a point of inner calm, and its effect on the opening night Adelaide Festival audience showed very strongly. The cast had taken their bows and the house lights were up. The formalities said that people were free to go, but they chose not to. Such is the involvement invoked by Songs of the Wanderers.

---The Sydney Morning Herald

. . . so touching that one can not help crying . . . tears of joy -- one's heart nearly explodes from such a great theatrical experience.

The work is deeply rooted in the religions, mysticism, meditations and philosophies of Asia. Thus one would assume that Georgian folk songs are a poor choice of music, but when its contemplative voice flows through the hall, one can only feel as if the music was specially made for this dance.

---Aftenpoften, Oslo

Songs of the Wanderers from 1994 is more than a dance performance, pointing artistically and culturally in many directions, but still gathered into one unity, recognizable if not comprehensible. It is a pilgrim journey where divine humility and oasis of hope are expressed in every tendon and knot of the beautiful Taiwanese dance corps.

---Pollitiken, Copenhagen

A golden dance of rice . . . the restrained energy of the slow motion dancers is deeply touching . . . beautiful and powerful.

---Dagbladet, Oslo

. . . one of the star works of this year's Adelaide Festival.

Whether realizing it or not, we have been taken on a spiritual journey by means of some very sophisticated and skilful arts of the theatre. The performers have superb control, the lighting is some of the most subtle seen in a long time.

---The Australian, Adelaide

With Songs of the Wanderers, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan presented without a doubt the highlight of the TollWood Festival.

--Abend Zeitung, Munich

The strongest movement comes from the monk who stands 90 minutes praying, bald headed and in a white shirt incessantly sprayed with rice, which splashes in fountains over his head and folded hands. The picture of the monk becomes a metaphor for an ideal that reaches from East to West, from Brahma into the Christian middle ages, supported by the Georgian chorus. Songs of the Wanderers presents dance as a meditative-religious act. Emerging again from the deluded pictures, hurled rice and floods, there remains the theme: Time Eternal.

---Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

Lin's dancers have been exquisitely schooled, mentally and physically. They can hold a sculpted position so long they seem to have been turned into sculpted stone, or move as slowly as melting wax.

--Saint Paul Pioneer Express, USA

The minimal, meditative movements of the dancers are extremely moving. So are the picturesque scenes shinning with golden rice grains. All these create a spiritual landscape of emptiness . . .

---Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin

The audience shares the spirit of meditation depicted onstage, surrenders the hurly-burly of everyday living for this temple of enforced quiet, where time seems to stand still. . . . It is a journey worth taking, and a celebration of the religious life of the East that will leave its special imprint on all who have been fortunate to see it.

--The Melbourne Age