Beijing**Client|Reporter Gao Qian Fang Fei.
Coming to the mainland again this time, many viewers feel that Cloud Gate Dance Theatre seems to be different and has become younger. In the pre-performance visit, Zheng Zonglong said. From December 7th to 10th, after a gap of four years, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre returned to the National Centre for the Performing Arts with its work "Xia", which concluded the mainland tour. 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, and now, as the company bids farewell to its founder, Lin Huaimin, and enters the era of its new artistic director, Zheng Zonglong.
* The most classic melody of "A Cappella Cello Suite" echoes leisurely, and the 13 dancers are "pushed" into the box-like stage space in a panic, and begin to paint vivid scenes with their limbs and intense colors. Zheng Zonglong's choice of ** "Da Wu" here is not a cello performance, but by the ** family Shimizu Yasuaki with a saxophone, this kind of musical instrument played with breath, in Zheng Zonglong's view, is closer to the inside of people - "Xia" is a work about the heart, its creative opportunity originated from Zheng Zonglong inadvertently saw a glow, the clouds stretched, ever-changing, just like the mood of the same people are endlessly changing.
At the beginning of the rehearsal, it was the darkest moment when the epidemic in Taiwan became serious, and the dancers could only rehearse together through online **, and this unprecedented "cloud" meeting inspired Zheng Zonglong to open a new creative model: "The background of each dancer's home is different, the room is rich in color, and it is no longer the uniform appearance of the rehearsal room, and the living conditions are different from what I usually see. Zheng Zonglong excavated each person's unique story from the different rooms and the emotions of sorrow and joy, abstracting the dancers' good memories and lonely moments into the ups and downs of the stage again and again. At the same time, he invited Zhou Dongyan, the winner of the World Theatre Design Award, and Wei Heting, an animation designer, to join in the creation, refining the images of the dancers into stage visions, some of which are a cloud, some are a face, and some are just a line, which are complex or simple, all of which are reflections of the dancers' state of mind.
The performance consists of 12 dance sections, each of which seems to be independent of each other, but in fact it is interrelated and bursts out of the dancers' lives. Guided by the meaning of seeing and interrogating the heart, "Xia" is filled with a large number of solo and pas de deux sequences, sometimes pointing to the anxiety and hesitation of the heart, and sometimes evoking the stretching and self-reconciliation of the individual, or the conflict, relief, and laughter between people. At the end, the clouds reflected in the image drift away, the white curtain rises, and a "daylight" lights up in the depths of the stage, the clouds and mist are shrouded in the sun, like the sunset, and the silhouette of the dancer is wanton and chic, he drives away the haze, chases and welcomes the arrival ...... of the "Xia" that shines on the heart
For example, soon after the opening of the film, the dancers use their bodies to build a "ladder" that echoes the lines of the mountains projected on the screen, and they support each other in the continuous movement and transformation of their limbs, allowing a dancer to complete the "climb" with almost no feet on the ground, and the tacit understanding required can be imagined. In addition, whether it is the precise control of the body of the dancer shown in the solo dance, or the neatness and internal tension shown in the group dance, it is a solid confirmation of the 50 years of profound accumulation and inheritance of tradition of Cloud Gate Dance Set. At the same time, the audience can indeed perceive a hint of change in the company: Lin Huaimin's previous works such as "Legacy", "Water Moon" and "Pine Smoke" have faded, and the bright and modern undertones are briskly blended in, illuminating the present at their fingertips. As Lin Huaimin said of Xia, Cloud Gate Dance Ensemble has "never been so light and colorful", and some of the answers seem to be self-evident as to where this internationally renowned dance company will go in the future.