Cloud Gate's Collective Grunt
Silence was clamorous and stillness whipped to a froth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Tuesday night, when the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan opened this season's Next Wave Festival. The dancers' collective grunt became a kind of downbeat as the curtain rose on dancers caught in the act of flailing and thrashing, midair and in media res in "Wild Cursive," the final installment of "Cursive: A Trilogy." The choreography by Lin Hwai-min uses serpentine squiggles to simulate the cursive tracery of calligraphy, blended with the pummeling legs of Asian martial arts.
"Wild Cursive," for around 20 dancers, is fierce and often forbidding. All dancers are dressed similarly, with the men barechested in flowing black pajama pants, and the women in black jersey jumpsuits. Corteges arrive out of the dark in silence, and three men wait downstage right for their counterparts, who are standing upstage left.
There is communication between splintered and disparate groups: They play tag or engage in call-and-response dialogue. There are abrupt transitions between tone, mood, and tempo, which gravitates to slow motion or fast and furious. The dancers' legs slice and dice or they all lie down and put their ears to the ground. Balletic movements are performed with the legs turned in, or suddenly resolve into a martial arts assault torpedoing into space. Action sometimes slows to a standstill, and, at 70 minutes running time, tedium doesn't become an insurmountable problem. And the very act of nonaction becomes an assertive projection of negative space, a comment on the potential of the tabula rasa.
The frequent intervals of silence create suspense about when and what sounds will emerge. When the sounds do commence, they suggest the natural world: crickets, wip o' wills, the howling wind. A faint alarm sound beeping way off becomes something forbidden.
Integral to the action are silk panels that scroll down slowly from the flies. Sheathed in cones of light, they make possible a shadow play that engages the silhouettes of dancers hidden behind the panels or lined up in front of them. When the panels rise, the dancers are disclosed and no evasion is possible. The stage clears and a woman of authority enters and performs a contraction. One of her legs is crossed in a deep knee bend. She seems like a solitary, self-reflective stylite.
The piece comes to an end as a man and woman slowly perform an advance-retreat maneuver that soon is augmented by a virtual army, an undulating huddle that moves from center stage to upstage left, suggesting a pack waiting to devour the lone man who stands downstage right. We hear the sound of breakers as one by one the dancers themselves move downstage, slowly churning like waves crashing on the shore.
Until October 7 (30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).
