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Writing on Lin Hwai-Min's extraordinary choreographic epic 'Nine Songs', one has to start with a (short) theoretical detour. A detour irnposed by the choreography's delicate intricacies, by its embedment in a complex syncretism. Structured around an ever-expanding (cultural) multi-referentiality - both in its choreographic language, a language that amalgamates diverse Eastern and Western dance techniques, as well as in its musical score, that thrives in a nomadic soundscape - 'Nine Songs' can be read as a perfect choreographic paradigm for a true intercultural dance form.

My use of the term 'intercultural' rather than the most current 'multicultural' derives from Bonnie Marranca's proposition (in her introduction to a collection of essays from the Performing Arts Joumal [1]) of 'intercultural' to describe certain contemporary performative practices. Sometimes, it is the case that the arrival of a new concept, of a new term, in our rhetorically confusing times of deconstructivist, post-structuralist and post-modernist terminology, only helps to expand entropy and to complexify our discourse, rather than to simplify it. But I find Marranca's 'interculturalism' extremely useful because it addresses specific performative practices in a multicultural condition, practices which reflect upon and problematise the fact of multiculturalism itself. Marranca proposes the term precisely to address the complex contemporary predicament of theatrical practices, that see themselves as not only taking place amidst cross-currents of styles, traditions, techniques, ideologies, images and imaginations but that purposefully collapse and problematise all those currents in their own performative and theoretical work. In contradistinction to 'multiculturalism' (an ontological statement of the post-colonial, post-modern predicament of con- temporaneity) 'interculturalism' signifies a theatrical as well as theoretical praxis. Marranca writes, "What is 'interculturalism'? The writings that cluster around the world of this word alternately address theory, technique, politics, aesthetics, theatrical production, critical writing. Interculturalism is linked to world view, practice, and theory/criticism - that is, the mental attitude that precedes performance, the performance process, and the theoretical writing that accompanies performance. A fairly recent addition to theatrical vocabulary, interculturalism, then, is a state of mind, as much as a way of working." (1)

In a movement that exactly illustrates the appropriateness of the term, it was actually Lin Hwai-min's choreography that helped me to better understand Marranca's theoretical definition of interculturalism. The detour has been made- and the question now is to try to explicate what is both so extraordinary, and so 'intercultural' in Lin Hwai-min's 'Nine Songs'.

Some theatre theoreticians, such as Richard Schechner, propose that one starts going to a performance the moment one decides to attend it. I would emphasise that if that is so, then such a condition entails particular problems when a Western audience is going to attend what is advertised as a performance from an 'exotic' culture. By the time one finally arrives at the theatre - programme in hand, going through the motions of (already) trying to understand, even before the curtain is up - one is already 'informed' by multiple 'explications', not to say numerous preconceptions. The 'understanding' that informed me while I waited for the performance to start at the Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music was that Lin Hwai- min was a choreographer from Taiwan, that he had a vast training from both Euro-American dance techniques (particularly Graham and Cunningham) as well as 'Eastern' dance techniques (particularly traditional Chinese techniques) and that he had vivid political as well as spiritual concerns regarding his work. I also knew that while normally BAM's Next Wave Festival has a very safe policy regarding European and American contemporary choreography, it has a history of good programming as far as Asia is concerned (I remember Javanese choreographer Sardono Kusumo's extraordinary 'Passage through the Gong' in the Next Wave Festival of '93).

But even before the first gesture of the dance, Lin Hwai-min had already sabotaged those pre-determined, if hot over-determined, 'knowledges' that settle down meaning and the audience's anxiety regarding contact with 'otherness': for the pacified and contained 'explications' we could be carrying with us regarding the 'exotic', 'Eastern' dance, was effectively destabilised by means of the stunning scenography of Ming Cho Lee.

Lee's austere yet tremendously organic sort of modernism (on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the Lincoln Center, Ming Cho Lee stated that he finds himself "perpetually trying to catch up with the Postmodern") served the piece even before it started. The side wings and hanging cloths were simply covered by a painted fabric, a huge enlargement of a Chinese painting of a lotus flower. This plain geometry gestured towards the idea of framing and commented on the need to re-frame our perspective as an audience. The flatness and symmetry of the painted surfaces contrasted with a pond full of lotus flowers that occupied the entirety of the orchestra pit. Between geometry and organicism, between the embracing of the proscenium and its deconstruction, the set already unsettles the audience's 'knowledge'. Nothing is simply one-layered, but contains (in itself) some other realm.

The first movement of the choreography does not come from a body, but is that of the word as a moving trace - projected Chinese calligraphies flapping on a transparent screen covering the entire proscenium. Traces replace each other to tell a history that, for the Western eye, remains indecipherable. And as the music starts, there is for a brief moment an odd saturation of what we, dance-lovers at a prestigious Dance Theater Festival in New York City, believe the 'East' should properly be. But as soon as the dance begins, again Lin Hwai-min immediately subverts this idea. To the music of the Tsou tribe of the Ali Mountain in Taiwan, a wide circle of dancers in white surrounds a dramatic female figure in red at the center - as if in the primordial moment of the dance it is the female body which must occupy its center, and what is most interesting, it is as if this feminine center must invoke dance's great liberator that was Martha Graham (for is ultimately about liberation, and in my view, in more levels than just political liberation).

Here, already, the gestures of interculturalism mine and mime the field of perception, the spectator's 'world view'. The woman in red (the dancer Lee Ching-chun) portrays a shaman - she invokes and greets the gods; her movements are contractive, she stands at the center of a wide circle of white dressed dancers; she is the center of a giant lotus. Suddenly her hands flicker. The eye is tricked - if this is a 'Taiwanese' dance, it is a pretty unusual one. It seems more as if the Orient had decided to recapture the idea of orientalism, recycle it, regenerate it, and spill it out with unusual dramatic intensity. Any references to Graham's technique and body of work, with its emphatic contractions, are constantly subverted by the embodied softness and fluidity of some gestures; any choreographic reference to Graham's 'Primitive Mysteries' (1931) is always undermined by the imagetic suggestions to the sacred lotus flower.

As this strange ritual evolves, the audience is increasingly drawn into the hypnotic intensity of the dance, to its supernatural perfection. It is almost too much, too intense, too well done, too clean visually. And then comes the disruptive moment that abruptly brings us back into the West, into the theatre, into ourselves, creatures of post-coloniality. A man in a dark suit with a large dark suitcase calmly crosses the stage. Brecht would have approved of it, this moment of interruption, when the audience is forced to experience a critical estrangement. I would say that it is precisely in the intelligent use in choreography of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, that one can see that Lin Hwai- min is doing in 'Nine Songs' much more than just blending Eastern and Western choreographic and staging techniques. Lin Hwai-min's choreography is hot based on the principles of collage, of fragmentation, and of other post-modernist tropes. Rather, Lin Hwai-min is exploding the categories and morphing into a new body. East with East, West with West, East with West, thus creating a new aesthetic for a nomadic, politicised moving body; he is transgressing the idea of boundaries proper, in order to create an extra-ordinary proposal for a post-colonial, intercultural gestus and trajectory for the dancing body. A dancing body that, in the case of the Cloud Gate Company, becomes a syncretic body, trained in Tai Chi, meditation, Chinese Opera movement, modern dance and ballet, and serving an intercultural choreography, as defined earlier.

Intercultural performance emerges out of a.tracing dawn of paths. There is always a travelling, or rather an accumulation of displacements, informing the shape and content of the performance. If this performance happens to be a dance piece, this nomadism becomes the dancer's second skin. In this nomadism of body techniques, one inevitably finds politics close by - and one could say that Lin Hwai-min's choreography dwells in what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze defined as the "nomad thought", a thought that is 'deterritorialised', that lives drifting outside the proper boundaries of law. In Lin Hwai-min's case, the laws that are left behind are those of proper technical and aesthetic rules for the 'Eastern' and 'Western' dances. And throughout each of the songs that constitute the whole piece, it strikes me the way that Lin Hwai-min recuperates efficiently and without embarrassment the use of the simplest allegorical formulations to convey the choreography's political message.

When the already described section of the invocation of the gods transmutes info a nightmarish sequence where some dancers manipulate others as soulless puppets, to mold them in the most awkward and uncanny poses, the allegory may be old but its imagetic effectiveness is surprisingly touching. This sequence already reinforces Lin Hwai-min's spellbinding syncretic language. To the ominous sound of Tibetan Buddhist Tantras of Gyötö, the dancers perform a powerful and delicate sequence where their bodies collapse, shatter in front of our eyes, in impossible configurations - configurations of death more than of life. It is an inferno. The circle made by the dancers becomes an ambiguous metaphor - of Dante's concentric Inferno, as well as of the redemptive Lotus that nevertheless does not prevent the pain and abuses in the 20th century history of cultural mas: sacres in the confrontations within Eastern nations, between them and between East and West. When the dance, the sound, the virtuosity of the dancers, and the complex flow of the choreography are all leading the audience toa hypnotic state, again Lin Hwai- min ruptures time by briefly introducing once more the figure of the traveler in a black suit, of a man riding a bike and of two large colourful puppets. The audience snaps out of pathos and laughs. But the laughter is tainted by a disquieting flavour.

Perhaps the most spectacular use of allegory in 'Nine Songs' is the extraordinary dance of the God of the Clouds. A dancer stands on the backs of two others these last two dancers function as an extension of the god's feet. Ambivalence is immediately given in this simple bodily configuration - the god crushes his folIowers but at the same time he is supported by them. To the sound of Japanese Gagaku music these three men will perform one of the most efficient allegorical images of the piece (andat the same time one of its toost extra-ordinary dance sections). The god and the carriers cannot live independently of each other, and the physical ordeal all the three dancers have to endure in order to make the dance happen effectively conveys the complex relations obtained between master and slave, coloniser and colonised. Thus, each 'song' and each element of a 'song' will add up to the next one, slowly unfolding its story - the people on bicycles become the Chinese students in Tiannamen Square, running away from the bullets, or courageously facing the armed tanks. In the end, the stage is calmly filled with candles, suggesting a long path losing itself in the darkness, and we hear the names of those fallen in the violent history of China, Taiwan, Japan.

Meaning for Lin Hwai-min is essentially phenomenological. He composes each set of bodies a a visual artist, using the delicacy of Delacroix and the violence of Bacon - there is something of Buro here, but amalgamated in a new, more fluid form. One of the many factors contributing to make this choreography so compelling is the way Lin Hwai-min treats the still image as accurately and rigorously as the most complex dance sequence. But in his manipulation of the visual, Lin Hwai- min escapes what Frederic Jameson pointed out as being the "visual las] essentially pornographic, which is to say it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination". (2) Lin Hwaimin's choreography of images denies mindlessness, and the fetishising of the 'exotic' by a careful manipulation of time. If dance lives through time, Lin Hwai-min manipulates time itself as another choreographic element, extending it, contracting it, freezing it, disrupting it, slowing it down. It is this use of time and of timing that reinforces the spectacular details of the dances but also the epic qualities of 'Nine Songs'. The audience is never allowed to rest in the comfort of false 'ethnographies' or in the 'pornographic' raptures of the gaze rather, we are drawn into the ontologically revolutionary time of the nomadic thought as dance.

References

1. Bonnie Marranca & Guatam Dasgupta, eds.: 'lnterculturalism and Performance'; PAJ Publications, New York; 1991
2. Frederic Jameson: 'Signatures of the Visible'; Routledge: New York & London, 1992.