Taiwanese Contemporary Dance: From the Chinese Body to Intercultural Corporality

This paper is devoted to three “Chinese” dances from the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan (Yunmen Wuji) choreographed by Lin Huaimin: The Tale of the White Serpent (Baishe zhuan, 1975), Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng, 1983) and Nine Songs (Jiuge, 1993). The author analyses the dances and their cultural context. The paper traces how the Taiwanese choreographer reaches not only for Chinese topics taken from traditional poetry, prose and religion / mythology but also uses the movement and gestic conventions typical of the Beijing opera. The focal point of the analysis is to show how Lin Huaimin merges them with the Western modern / contemporary dance and classical ballet techniques, Asian dancing traditions, and Japanese butō, thus creating a new form of inter-cultural body aesthetics and a dance theatre which crosses the borders of the arts.