Under the direction of choreographer Lin Hwai-min, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan has been exploring traditional Chinese body disciplines. Songs of the Wanderers (1994), a triumph at the Next Wave Festival in 2000, comes from the practice of meditation. Moon Water (1998), topping the list of best dance events of 2003 chosen by Anna Kisselgoff, chief critic at The New York Times, owes its movement motives to Tai Chi Tao Yin, a Chi Kung exercise that can be traced back to more than 2000 years ago.

In 2001, Lin Hwai-min further explored the possibilities of Tai Chi Tao Yin and martial arts, and created Cursive, with its title derived from Chinese calligraphy. After studying Chinese calligraphy masterpieces, Lin found, despite the differences in styles, all the brush works shared one common element: the focused energy with which the calligraphers“danced”during writing. He asked Cloud Gate dancers to improvise by facing blown-up images of calligraphy. The dancers absorbed the energy, or Chi, of the writer, and imitated the linear“route”of ink, full of lyrical flows and strong punctuations, with rich variations in energy. The exercise produced unimaginable movements, with subtle slow motions and dynamic martial-arts-like attacks. These eventually became the movement material for Cursive, a work of stunning beauty that has received rave reviews in Europe and the U.S., where it opened the American Dance Festival in 2003.

Cursive II, a sequel to Cursive, won both The Age Critics' Award as well as the Festival Patron's Award at the Melbourne International Arts Festival in 2003. Although both Cursive and Cursive II were inspired by the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy, Cursive II, set to the music of John Cage, is drastically different from its forerunner. Chinese believe there are five shades of black ink. While Cursive emphasizes the darker blacks with vigorous attacks, Cursive II explores the lighter shades in a meditative mood, evoking the serene quality of porcelain from the Sung Dynasty.

The conclusion of this trilogy, Wild Cursive was premiered in November 2005. With a movement style developed through the years, and the advanced technical and mental strength of the dancers, Lin approached the work with more confidence and freedom. He drew choreographic ideas from Kuang Chao,“wild calligraphy,”which is considered the pinnacle in Chinese cursive aesthetics and frees characters from any set form and exposes the spiritual state of the writer in its expressive abstraction.

Inspired by the spirit of“wild calligraphy,”Wild Cursive utilizes paper as its only set. On a stage covered by white marley, streams of white rice paper cascade to the floor with black ink pouring from hidden pipes above, and seeping on to the paper slowly and almost invisibly. The ink feathers and spreads in abstract patterns true to the spirit of chance as set forth in I-Ching -- The Book of Changes. With these traces of time accumulating, an art installation of“set in progress”emerges. As the ink breaths through the performance, the lighting design illuminates the transparency of the rice paper and thereby enhancing the power of the flowing black images.

Against and between the layers of rice paper, Cloud Gate dancers' exquisitely liquid movement echoes the serpentine and meandering lines of the ink. Throughout, the dancers' breath coming from the Dan Tian, the core of their torsos, provides a subtle undercurrent to this constantly shifting feast for the eyes. Their organic vocals and foot stamps further enrich the sounds from the hum of cicadas, gusts of wind, waves breaking on the pebbled beaches, dripping water, rainfall, foghorns and temple bells, creating a natural soundscape.