Human body versus the screen—that is Cloud Gate Artistic Director Cheng Tsung-lung’s premise, I think, in Lunar Halo. Seventy unbroken minutes to the ambient electronica of Icelandic band Sigur Rós and spans of silence. It’s quite a trip—or so it seems for the dancers, six female, seven male, in trance or primitive (simian moves hint at it) ritual. Human evolution is in there somewhere.
Men group into centipede lines, arms knitted in delicate crochet embroidery, form a pyramid to get a better look at these fierce women, come together in circle dance. Lined up behind each other their arms wave like the goddess Kali. Individuals perform supple t’ai chi / martial arts solos, fists clenched. One reminds me of Akram Khan’s Creature.
Thrashing bodies, minimal costumes, bare torsos, ragged skirts, tattered trousers (those fringed trouser make me think there’s a bucking bronco scenario as a woman rides a man), women’s hair obscuring their faces, this could be a rite of spring. A lunar halo augurs ill, a sense of foreboding. Dry ice. Have they gone lunatic in their fear, in their desire to assuage the moon god?
Strong kinetic images on a darkened stage (lighting Shen Po-hung), but can they compete with the vast screen above them, behind them, reflecting and refracting them into multitudes, descending to almost flatten them?
Lunar Halo, it seems to me, is also a video installation and / or a performance art piece. Fascinated by, and Cheng Tsung-lung admits he is addicted to, screen technology, especially during the torpid COVID period, when he took over directorship of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre from founder Lin Hwai-min, its video design by Ethan Wang and visual design / direction by Jam Wu almost overwhelms the dancers. Maybe that’s the point.
Stage right on a tall LED panel is the figure of a naked man in all his glory. He is painted white, becomes a statue, marble or brushed bronze, eyes hollow. Is Cheng Tsung-lung glorifying the human form, as artists have over the ages? Are the dancers performing at its feet in supplication?
Legs, toes, elongate on that tall screen—it could be a radiologist’s printout. At the back, a horizontal wide screen the width of the stage shows the figure of a naked woman, another an inverted woman’s face. Bodies scrutinized, whilst the real sweaty ones are down below, in front, to the side, flailing as if their lives depended on it.
The screens take on colour, swirling mists, a waterfall, and late Matisse-like lines. What can’t the screens do… Hands grow like ferns up from the stage and vanish. The moon’s halo on screen has something of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, and some of Wayne McGregor’s and Tacita Dean’s oeuvre, too.
Founded in 1973, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan celebrates its half-century anniversary this year. They are huge in Taiwan, they are very popular here, too, almost selling out. Cheng Tsung-lung first saw a lunar halo in Iceland—maybe this is a warning to us, a wake-up call (too soporific and mesmerising for me) to get our acts together in the face of AI… Are his dancers in Purgatory or in Hell already?