THE RELIGIOUS ICONS AND THE CULTURE

OF THE GODDESS

IN CONTEMPORARY TAIWAN DANCE THEATER 


版權所有copyright.gif (70 bytes)劉紀蕙

發表於Fu Jen Studies. 1998: 30-49


 

I. Religious Images and the Goddess in Contemporary Taiwanese Dance Theater

This paper is part of my recent research project which deals with the constructions and transformation' of cultural identities in Taiwan literature and the arts. [1] As a professor of comparative literature, when I work with cultural issues, I naturally would like to see the intersemiotic interpretations of such issues in various genres such as literature, paintings, music, film, theatrical texts and dance. In this paper, I plan to discuss the cultural significance of the religious icons, and especially the gestures of the goddesses, which populate the dance texts by contemporary Taiwanese choreographers. I shall take the critical position suggested by scholars like Jane Desmond and Amy Koritz, who work on both dance history and cultural studies, that dance is a form of representation, and as “codified dance structure or technique” it can be “conceptualized as a semiotic of discursive policing of the body” (Koritz 90). Furthermore, that dance should be treated as a “location for the symbolic enactment of larger ideological issues facing a society” (Koritz 92). I would like to suggest that through contemporary Taiwan dance texts, especially through the oriental folkloric religious icons and the images of the goddesses performed on stage, we can detect the cultural politics, invested through these religious icons, which reveal a collective ambivalence toward the Central Land Chinese tradition and the artists’ attempts to renovate and to bring forth a new culture in Taiwan. [2]

The tendency towards religiousness, especially towards oriental religions, is obvious in recent Taiwanese dances. We can find abundant religious icons in the Cloud Gate Dance Ensemble’s works such as Dreamland, Nirvana, Nine Hymns, Wanderer 's Song, and the most recent work Family Picture, U-Theater (Liu Jingmin)’s Pilgrimage to the Temple of Mazu, Guanghuan (Liu Shaolu)’s Wandering though the Lands (Dadi Manyiu) and its experiment of the Qi, Duomianxiang (Tao Fulan)’s Temple of the Heart and her recent work Gaia, the Mother of the Earth, and Taigu Tales Dance Theater (Lin Xiuwei)’s Myth of the Late 20th Century, The Life of Mandala, The Back of Beyond, and The Ritual of Deities.

What interests me the most are the images of the goddesses in these Taiwanese dance texts, such as Nu Wa, Ma Ku (Ma Zu), Kuanyin (Kannon), Shamanistic priestess, witches of the Taiwanese aboriginal tribes, and even Hinduist Shakte and Gaia. The body images presented through these goddesses on the stage are not at all the so-called traditional feminine qualities, such as delicateness, gentleness, softness, tenderness; instead, these goddesses convey energetic and even convulsive powers of both being life-giving and of destruction.

This trend among Taiwanese choreographers toward the rediscovery of and re-imaging the goddesses reminds us of the worldwide phenomenon of the Women’s Spirituality Movement. Along with the appearance of Marija Gimbutas’s The goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974) and Merlin Stone's When God was a Woman (1976), various researches and books on the cults of the goddesses followed in the fields of archeology, anthropology, theology, art history, and women’s studies. Some studies aimed at rethinking the feminine in the sacred, some tried to prove the existence of particular goddesses in primitive tribes, and some even attempted to renovate the cults and bring them alive. [3] From the trans formations and the migration of certain goddesses across cultures and from the various functions and attributes attached to one and the same goddess, we are led to face the multiple facets of the goddesses and the cultural messages behind the images of the goddesses. When we deal with Taiwanese choreographers’ reliance on the goddess icons in their dance texts, we need to search for the local significance within its cultural context.

The phenomenon of contemporary Taiwanese dancers’ imitation with their bodies of the oriental religious images, besides the artists’ personal spiritual quests and besides their motivation to represent local religious experience, can be seen as an effort to link with the Orient in order to cut off from the Western influences. It sounds paradoxical to see oriental dancers making the effort to link with the Orient. But, if we take the history of Taiwanese modern dance into consideration, we understand the meaning of “linking with the Orient.” Modern dance is rooted in the West. So is Taiwanese modern dance. It was through Western modern dance that Taiwanese dancers could liberate themselves from the conventions of the traditional Chinese ethnic dance." [4] Since the beginning of the modern dance era, Taiwanese dancers had to be trained to familiarize themselves with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Merce Cunninghum, Jose Limen, Alwin Nikolais, Pina Bausch, which were the Cloud Gate’s regular courses. But along with the development of western theater, Taiwanese dancers also have been exposed to Grotovsky’s poor theater, Richard Scheckner's ritual theatre, Japanese Butoh theatre and the rest. Equally paradoxically, it was also the western theatre and its urge for performers to search for the inspiration and strength from their own culture and their own bodies which pushed Taiwanese dancers to begin their own root-finding ordeals and to refuse to echo western-trained body languages. This root-finding movement ends up with Taiwanese dancers’ reemployment of the long-forgotten local folk rituals.

The “Oriental icons” in Taiwan dance theater have to be read with new meanings which are different from the traditional Oriental icons. For the western audience, the oriental icons indicate a whole set of alien, remote and even exotic atmospheres and associations which they are not familiar with. For the Taiwanese audience, however, the so-called oriental icons, or rather the “Chinese icons,” such as the motifs of classical Chinese architecture, the red door, the flying roof, or the traditional Chinese costumes, the water-sleeve of such costumes, and even traditional Chinese literary allusions, were once what they were familiar with through past readings and education and what they felt at home with but what, with the passage of time and the political changes between the two governments, has turned out to be something strange and uncanny, and something they cannot return to. In other words, the “Chinese icons” represent something remote in time, place, and ideology, but because they are both dear to the modern Taiwanese and also alien to them, these icons are treated with ambivalent feelings, like a maternal body severance from which is not easy but necessary in order for the subject to find its subject position. Consequently, in opposition to the extracultural “West,” this “East” or the “Root” is the part of the intraculture which has been partly treasured and partly suppressed.

In contrast to the “Chinese” icons which indicate classicism and canonistic Chinese tradition there are the folkloric religious icons, a different set of oriental icons that carry quite different connotations. The folkloric religions and their ritual practices, such as the Daoist or the shamanistic rituals, have long been denigrated by the Confucian tradition and therefore dismissed from serious academic discussions. Along with the process of modernization and westernization in the modern age, the folkloric religions continued to be taken as superstitious and backward and to be banned from the scenes of formal cultural performances. Because of the emphasis on the local and the folkloric culture and the reliance on the roles of the goddesses in the religious icons employed by contemporary Taiwan choreographers, however, these Oriental religious icons are used on the stage to indicate the statement to deviate from the canonistic Confucian tradition, which has been elaborated through past centuries to support the patriarchal and highly hierarchical social and political system; along with this statement to reset the canontistic Central Land culture, these performative texts also ennunciated the unspoken statement to sever from “"China," and thereby bring forth a new culture in Taiwan. [5]

In the following, I shall analyze the religious images and the goddess icons in the dance texts of Lin Huaimin, Tao Fulan and Lin Xiuwei as examples to illustrate how their dance texts appropriate these religious icons as interface of resistance in order to perform a cultural statement to sever from the Chinese tradition and to bring about a rebirth of a new Taiwan culture. I shall point out that the urge for a new culture of the goddess spelled out in Lin Huaimin’s recent dance texts have been reiterated by the two leading female dance artists, both through their dance theories, their choreographs and their dance performances. I would like to argue, however, that the intention to establish a shrine for the statues of the goddesses would unwittingly freeze the dynamic forces of a new culture and consequently fetishize the cathected visual icons; instead of regulating certain postures, the only possible way for the “goddesses” to dance, and hence a new form of art and culture to be born, would be to allow for a flowing and changeable form and the freedom of space.

 

II. Lin Huaimin and the New Culture of the Goddess

 

We could see the development of Taiwanese modern dance history as well as the transformations of Taiwanese culture from a mainland-centered Chinese identity and sentiments to a local-bound cultural identity through Lin Huaimin’s choreography and the performances of his “Cloud Gate Dance Ensemble” over the past twenty-five years. Lin's choreography began from the highly westernized body language clothed with traditional Chinese literary allusions in his early texts of the mid-seventies, such as The Story of the White Snake and Hanshi, and gradually changed to the relocation of the cultural roots through the story of early Taiwanese immigrants and local rituals in Heritage and Bajiajiang of the late seventies, the examination of urban life through the hysteric gestures in DreamLand, My Nostalgia, My Song in the mid-eighties, and then to the religious turn in Nirvana, The Wanderer 's Songs, Red Chamber Dream and Nine Hymns from mid-eighties to the nineties.

Throughout his choreographic career, Lin Huaimin’s dance texts reveal the dimension of religiousness as well as his problematization of the Chinese vs. Taiwanese identities. Even in dances unrelated with religious themes or religious motifs, such as The Story of the Snake and Hanshi of his classical stage, we can see Lin's question is concerned with the existence and the quest for identity in modern Taiwan. For Lin at that stage, the dilemma for modern Taiwanese is defined by the conflicting conditions inherent within Chinese culture. The love story presented by Lin Huamin on stage between the scholar Xu Xian and the white snake woman, intervened by the monk, a traditional Chinese folk story which parallels Keats’ poem Lamia, could be interpreted as the bewildered and irrational passion of the scholar for the secret lover, perhaps Lin's’s ancient China, but is forbidden by the law, the government. Likewise, the duet between Lin Huaimin and the thirty-feet-long white cloth in Hanshi can be read as his struggle between the call to Survive and the bondage of his loyalty to his previous lord. [6]

When Lin deliberately borrows the gestures and poses in Oriental religious paintings or sculptures, we can see that he endows them with more complicated implications rather than merely expressing religious messages, In his Nirvana premiered at the Pompidou Center in 1982, a dance about the pilgrims in front of the Pyramid, and through the use of the cloth of the pilgrims which is brightly colored on one side and grey and dull on the other side, for example, we see Lin Huaimin’s interpretation focuses on the coexistence of holiness and desire, which has been Lin’s personal understanding of the meaning of “Nirvana.” In The Wanderer 's Song, based upon Hermann Hesse's’s novel of the same title, we see not only the story of the initiation and pilgrimage of a young man, but also the worship paid to the great earth through the use of rice grains and water. Thus it presents a very ancient Asian ritualistic practice. Lin said that what he did in The Wanderer’s Song was to convey a kind of spiritual state of “emptiness” (kong) and “stillness” (jing) and to bring to the audience peace and tranquility (Program of The Wanderer’s Song). What triggers the audience’s interest, however, is not the “stillness” nor the ritual, but the tension in the changes of the movements and images from life to death, from desire to piety, and the co-existence as well as the fluidity of both states, a constant recurring motif in Lin’s dance expressed through different forms.

Dreamland, premiered in 1985, shows a more direct treatment of religious icons. Images of "feitian," goddesses flying in the sky taken &from Dunhuang Caves, are projected onto the half-transparent screen on the stage. Visually the images of “"ffeitian" from the Dunhuang Caves recalls both the memories of old Chinese tradition and the awareness of its status as relics because of the remoteness in time and the visual effect of the translucent and illusive quality of the images on the screen. This half-transparent screen is placed in the middle section of the stage and thus separates the space into a front and a back part. [7] Women dancers in the darker area of the stage behind the screen imitate the gestures and movements of the flying goddesses and liberate the frozen positions of the goddesses on the cave painting on the screen; images of modern life, and bodies wrapped and tied up with white long cloth, are placed in the front part of the stage. The screen as well as the juxtaposition of the images of modern life with the images of Chinese tradition sharply create a sense of rupture. It is as if the memories of the dear past history in the back of people’s mind has been enacted and become tangible on stage, but the stillness of the images of the screen which separate the dances of the “"feitian" from the modern life has reminded the audience of the fetish and thus dead quality of these images, m,' therefore in a performative manner the Chinese tradition is perceived by modern Taiwanese audience with this conscious sense of rupture and separation.

Nine Hymns of 1993 presented a more dramatic performance of the separation of modern Taiwan from the past Chinese tradition. Lin said that Nine Hymns is the result of the thinking related to the drastic changes in the world and in Taiwan from 1986 to 1990, such as the lifting of the martial laws, the reunion of the East and the West Germany, the breaking down of the Soviet Union, the death of Zhou Kai, a member of the Cloud Gate, and the temporary closing-down of the Cloud Gate because of its financial restraints. Lin said that all these events forced him to stop and rethink the meaning of life, and consequently the message Nine Hymns wants to bring forth is something about life and rebirth.

Nine Hymns, based on the ancient poet Chu Yuan’s elegiac long poem, is a requiem. [8] This dance, I had argued in my previous paper on Lin, is Lin Huaimin's manifestation of his farewell to China Lin had to quote and restage once again the ancient Chinese culture so as to purge himself of his nostalgia ("Re-Staging Cultural Memory in Contemporary Theatre in Taiwan" p. 276). The dancers in Nine Hymns pray for the coming of the god and mourn for the souls of those who died for the country. The lady of Xiang River, wearing a piece of long white cloth, represents the traditional Confucian virtues of modesty, obeying the order and the place in the ideological hierarchy, while the priestess, with her shamanistic wild and forceful body movements, represents the power from the southern part of China, the power from the margin, and the power of regeneration.

Lin said to the dancer who dances the role of the priestess to lower the position of her pelvis, seeking the most extended position of her body, and to be “carried away by the god.” The purpose of the priestess’ dance is to seduce the god, to offer herself to the god, so that the great earth could start its process of regeneration. Lin Huaimin said that “the priestess in the Nine Hymn is a woman, a mature woman. She dances happily because she takes the fortune of the people as her own.” When the priestess sits besides the lotus pond, holding the dead body on her lap and cleansing it with lotus pond water, Lin specifies that this scene should echo the pose of the mother in the pieta, full of pity and great love. Therefore, we can see clearly that the duty of regenerating the culture, according to Lin the choreographer, is carried by the mother-like priestess. I have pointed out in "Re-Staging Cultural Memory in Contemporary Theatre in Taiwan” that Lin had adopted an androgenous presentation of the male dancers in his recent works which are very different from his early texts such as Heritage or the Little Drummer, and that his quite unconventional use of the male bodies on stage is to subvert the traditional male-dominated hierarchy of ideology in Chinese culture. His treatment of woman dancers, I would continue to argue, also is unconventional in terms of the traditional notion of the so-called feminine qualities or feminine movements. To be more precise, this “mother” o f LE Huaimin in Nine Hymns is not a mother who suffers and endures all burdens, but a “mother-goddess-priestess-witch” of different faces who is skilled g seduction, ecstasy, procreation, destruction and rebirth. An artist who attempts to create and bring forth new culture, in terms of Lin’s definition o f new culture, should act like a goddess and reenact the process of creation, destruction and recreation.

When Lin deals with Oriental religious icons on his stage, we notice that he tends to either use it as an icon to signal the pastness and remoteness o f the ancient Chinese culture to his Taiwanese audience, or to rely on the vocabulary of the folk religion, especially that of the goddess, so as to subvert the canonistic Confucian tradition. This borrowing of the folk religion and of the goddess images shows an underlying intention to resist the male-dominated Central-Land culture. To my mind, the goddess in Lin Huaimin’s dance texts discloses the artist’s design to endow Taiwanese culture with the power of regeneration. I would call it “the culture of the goddess” in contemporary Taiwanese. Such “culture of the goddess” deviates from the past “culture of the orphan,” which is based upon the loyalty to certain ideology, forever seeking its parents. The “culture of the goddess” allows the artist to dance playfully as a mature woman, changing the masks and the identities all the time, stimulating new desires, and breeding new lives.

I see a remarkable continuity between Lin Huaimin’s vision of the “culture of the goddess” and the two woman dancers, Tao Fulan and Lin Xiuwei, whom I have selected to study in the context of the project of cultural reformation in Taiwan. Tao Fulan and Lin Xiuwei are the two leading woman dancers and educators who have been using their bodies for years to work out their theories about dance and about art. They are both internationally known and locally influential. The dance groups they have established, “Dimensions Dance Theatre” by Tao Fulan and “Taigu Tales Dance Theatre” by Lin Xiuwei, have attracted many excellent young dancers and faithful audience. Lin Xiuwei is also the producer of the famous theater “The Contemporary Legend Theatre” which has staged The Kingdom of Desire. We could take these two representative female dance artists as examples to continue our discussion of the use of the religious images and the icon of the goddess in the “culture of the goddess,” which I would say is both highly dynamic but also prone toward fetishistic fixation of the status as “the Goddess” on the shrine.

 

III. Tao Fulan: &om the surrealist object collage to the goddess Gaia

 

Tao Fulan has moved a long self-searching way from her early experimental short pieces in 1984 and 1985, her first public performance of the ice-breaking feminist piece Those Women in 1987, then Alice in the 0'onderland in 1989, Happy Birthday in 1990, An Incredible Feminist Thesis written by Three Eccentric Women in 1991, Apocalypse fin-de-ciecIe and A World in the Urn in 1995, The Temple of the Heart in 1996 and finally her recent work Gaia, the Mother of All in1997. Her style also has changed from the political-oriented Pina Bausch dance theater, through a stage of root-finding classicism, to the current stage of religiousness.

The feminist voice in Tao’s dance has always been very obvious, and the premiere of “Those Women” in 1987 was remarked as “setting a new milestone for Taiwanese dance” (Lu Jianying 20). In an article written for the special issue of the Asian Women Artists Festival held in Hong Kong, Tao quoted the concept of a German feminist scholar Silvia Borenschen and pointed out that feminist consciousness in a broader sense lies in the question whether the woman could sensitively locate her own unique aesthetic form and language (Tao, Book of Dance 72). Tao further challenged the woman dancers in Taiwan to look into the root of their local culture and to internalize the qualities both of the East and of the West (73).

How to internalize the immanent qualities of the Eastern and Western culture so as to bring out the artist’s personal unique dance vocabulary is the agenda Tao Fulan set for Taiwanese dance artists as well as for herself. We noticed that Tao’s efforts to bridge the East and the West as well as to search for her personal forms of expression are present throughout her dance texts. Nevertheless, we also noticed that there are two different stages in Tao’s dance history: one is the stage in which Tao anxiously searches outward for new forms, and this anxiety results in the abundance of images in her work; the other, on the contrary, is the stage in which she seeks inward, to identify both culturally and spiritually with certain values, attempting to arrive at a more settled state. Those Women, Alice in the 0’onderland, Happy Birthday, An Incredible Feminist Thesis written by Three Eccentric Women, and Apocalypse fin-de-ciecle, I think, belong to the first stage, the stage of creative anxiety, and Journals of the Man in Gray, the Unhidden Spring, A World in the Urn, The Temple of the Heart, and Gaia, the Mother of All belong to the second stage, the stage of root-finding settlement. To me, Tao Fulan’s stage of anxiety is the most characteristic Tao’s style, full of humor, sharp criticism and convulsive creativity, and we can find the most original images in her dances of this stage; while in her root-finding stage, whether it is the root in traditional Chinese culture, or in the past history of Taiwan, or in religion, there is less boldness and dynamism, more obedience of the plot of the traditional story and imitation of the visual language of the poses of the statues, and even an echo of the motifs of rice, water, and candle light used by Lin Huaimin in The W'anderer’s Song, A'ine Hymns, and therefore less creativity.

Happy Birthday is the most representative work of the stage of anxiety. From this dance, we can pick up a whole load of surrealist images. The first image of the dance is a woman swinging in the dark, her head placed in a bird cage. This image is a quotation of the surrealist artist Masson’s object art “Pensee” (1938). Tao has said that the original motive for this dance is the impact she experienced when she looked at the “Self Portrait” by a surrealist woman artist Dorothea Tanning, and many other similar paintings which deal with feminine nightmare. Happy Birthday can be read as Tao Fulan’s self-portrait in which we see a surrealistic collage of object art to present a series of cage imagery, such as the long red cloth signifying gg conditions of woman’s giving birth, the red door signifying the confinement of the ancient Chinese culture, the apple signifying man’s desire for woman, and the ballet shoes which stand for the most unbreakable bondage for Tao as a dancer.

About women’s nightmare, Tao Fulan said, “I understand, because I am a woman.... But I do not like to stress my status as a woman. If one is self-conscious enough, every woman would be able to understand clearly and to express her own situation, including desire, anxiety, orgasm, and creation” (“program” Happy Birthday). What Happy Birthday and Alice in the wonderland express are about woman’s nightmare and existential anxiety. Tao Fulan once said that she always likes the fantastic and absurd dream world. She also showed that she was especially attracted by the absurd atmosphere and the surrealistic dream worid in the dance Education of the Girl-child by Meredith Monk (Book of Dance 67). We find out that the surrealistic nightmarish atmosphere and the absurd world have a fatal attraction for Tao, and it is this attraction which.brings out Tao’s creative energy and impulse.

In Apocalypse fin-de-ciecle of 1994 we again see the powerful impact of the absurd world of surrealist objects. The motif of breaking-out recurs through the image of the paper closet. Like a cocoon, the woman, or the artist’s creativity, is locked in the closet, or a stone, and tries to break out, to breathe, along with the drum, and to live. When the woman/artist finally comes out 5am the closet, she still is faced with the wasteland of the modern world, decorated by the garbage on the stage. In The Color of the Body, 1995, we also see this motif of breaking-out. It is clear that the dynamic force tom within the artist is so strong that she has to Qght her way out Gom the layers of confinements in order to dance &eely.

Tao’s root-finding stage, in both the quest for classical Chinese tradition and the subsequent quest for the local Taiwanese culture, leads toward the opposite direction away tom the stage of surrealist anxiety. Tao started to look for inspirations as well as cultural identity through looking into the body language in Peking opera and in local Taiwanese historical narratives. But this rooting-finding stage is the lowest pit of Tao’s creative career because she clings to the story line and the conventional techniques more faithfully in these dances. Tao knew it, and she said in an interview I had with her that though she had been always deeply in love with Chinese culture, she found that she was lost in a beautifui cave decorated by the traditional Chinese culture. She further explained that it is a fact that she could not find her own body rather than the way out (Tao, The Book of the Body 5). The effort to seek for cultural identity, either in the Chinese culture or in the Taiwanese history, cannot offer the generating power for Tao Fulan; instead, it leads her farther away from her own body and her creativity.

In Tao Fulan’s stage of spiritual pursuit 5om 1995, such as A 0’orld in the Urn, Temple of the Heart and Gaia, the Mother of All, we see mainly ritualistic slow movements, with chanting, with images of candle lights, rice, water, and motifs of circular shape, horizontal lines intersecting with vertical lines, together creating an atmosphere of serenity and quietude. Tao has said that, during her stage of spiritual pursuit, she asks herself,

 

What type of energy is hidden within my body? How could I discover these energies? How do I do to liberate them? How does self-constraint interact with my flesh? How do my body, my heart and my spirit grow together and take fly? How do I search for the root of my body, my heart and my spirit?

My enlightenment came from the moment I closed my eyes and meditate. When I entered my own body, when I meditate my body, my breath, my heart, my thoughts, I understood the meaning of stillness. ~en I understood the stillness, I discovered the source for movement When I realized that my thoughts went with my breath, my breath went with my thoughts, I discovered the operation of movement. When I realized the pregnant moment of the movement, I understood the essence of energy, and the changes between Yin and Yang. (The Book of the Body 5-6)

 

For Tao Fulan, to meditate the body is the first step of training her dancers need to go through. She has said too that there are two kinds of dance choreography: the “dance of the thinking body” and the “dance of the dancing body.” The “thinkiag body” carries the double visions which are off the focus, interfered by the excessive thoughts; the “dancing body” is the focused vision, the consciousness returned to the body, the spirit reunited with the form (The Book of the Body 94). The “thinking body” has tried too hard, so the river of energy is misguided, dammed or over-flooded, while the “dancing body,” after listening to the voices of the energy within, could liberate the river of energy.

Tao’s theories point out the relation between the dance with the river of inner energy within individual dancer’s body and the importance to understand individual body’s differences. In 1984 Tao criticized the “staleness” of the dance vocabulary used by contemporary dance circles who tried to combine the traditional Chinese dance and Western ballet and modern dance but with no creativity. She said that there is no “organic renovation” in their exploration of body language (The Book of Dance 91). In 1989, she wrote in one of her dance criticisms that the movement should not be stiffened poses or gestures, but moving energy, and it should be able to be injected into the space, and permeate its force in the space (The Book of Dance 137).

But, strangely, we find that the dance in Tao Fulan’s stage of spiritual pursuit, such as The 0'orld in the Urn, Temple of the Heart, and even Gaia, the Mother of all, repeats the tendency of reductionism and stabilization in her stage of root-finding quest and of fixed cultural identity. Inconsistent with her own theories about the inner energy, we notice in these dances a lack of inner energy and creative tension. This strange inconsistency, I think, is due to Tao’s obvious intention to present a religious ritual on stage, accompanied by gestures of meditation and vocal chanting. Besides her borrowing the rice motif, water motif and candle light motif, which Lin has used as religious elements, we also notice that the characteristic Tao Fulan style of convulsive motivating forces, which we have found in her surrealistic works, is lacking here. Therefore, we seem to see that when Tao anxiously searches outward for various forms of expressions, using &eely surrealist objects, she demonstrates most fully the changeable shapes of a powerful goddess of creation; on the contrary, when Tao piously bows in front of a goddess, be it the Gaia, or Guanyin, offering ritualistic worship, she has bound herself at a fixed position, even has put herself on the shrine, and is unable to change or to create.

Here comes the question which I think is worthwhile for us to discuss. From the differences between Tao’s two stages of choreography, or her two opposite styles of composition, we are faced with the nature of artistic creation.: Is artistic work a ritual to stabilize ourselves, or is it a process, urged by creative anxiety, on a constant move of changes? Tao’s dance theories about the inner river energy cleverly explains the relation between the external forms and the internal dynamism and both have to be constantly renewed and reshaped. But when Tao purposefully and deliberately searches for the goddess of the great earth, she looses her sense of humor, her playfulness and even her convulsive energy. It is clear in Tao’s case that whatever the symbolic system is, be it the ideology of national identity, or the religious piety, it would kill the semiotic impulses in the art work if the artist submits himself or herself entirely to this system.

 

IV.Nu Wa and the Image of Mandala in Lin Xiuwei’s Dance

 

Lin Xiuwei is one of the early dancers of the Cloud Gate Dance Ensemble during its founding stage. In one of the interviews I had with her, Lin Xiuwei said that through the rigorous training she received in the Cloud Gate, she could deftly employ various schools of body languages of Western modern dance, as well as make free use of the body vocabulary of Chinese Peking opera. She was famous as an excellent dancer well before she became a choreographer. But then she soon realized that her body does not belong to herself. She said that, after she left the Cloud Gate, the first experiment in her work The Myth at the End of the Century, premiered in 1987, a duet by Xiuwei and Wu Xingguo, was an attempt to return the most simple and most primitive state of the body, that is the state of the animal.

We noticed 6om her dance The Myth at the End of the Century that what Lin Xiuwei meant by the state of the animal and what she has presented on stage was actually Nu Wa, a goddess as well as a female animal. Nu Wa in ancient Chinese mythology is presented as the goddess of creation who created mankind by using clay. Nu Wa in ancient Chinese myth is also often illustrated with a body of woman and a tail of snake. Because of the energy of procreation implied by Nu Wa, she has been worshiped especially by folkloric religions. It is by the force of Nu Wa, the Goddess of creation, that Lin Xiuwei’s creativity could be set free.

The motif of Nu Wa and her life energy comes out in various forms through Lin Xiuwei, 5om her first work Nu 0'a, to The Myth of the Late 20th Century, to The Ritual of Deities in 1991, and Obsession of the Stone in 1993. The fact that Lin Xiuwei chose Nu 0’a as the first piece of her performance in her visit to New York shows her preference for the goddess figure. In her first choreographic work The Myth of the Late 20th Century, Lin dances with her two hands and knees on the ground, moving about on the stage, both as the mother and as the lover of the male beast, searching for food and for love. Her animalistic movements are pregnant of all possible dynamic changes. The mixture of her pliable movements with her beastly savageness, which we see in Nu Wa of The Myth of the Late 20th Century, is carried on in The Ritual of Deities. This is a performance of seven rituals based on traditions of the aboriginal tribes in the mountains of central Taiwan: the worship of the sun god, of the reptiles in the swamps, of the seeds vs. war, the rain, the tide vs. tears, of burial, and of the moon. These seven rituals, according to Lin Xiuwei, also involve seven different kinds of action motives and seven different stages of psychological changes. The priestesses, who have exaggerated breasts and celebrate a huge egg on the stage, play an important role in all rituals. In the Obsession of the Stone, once again, the woman-shaman recurs through Lin Xiuwei, the red woman dancer. This dance is formed by the dialogue between Lin Xiuwei and the Stone, danced by Wu Xingguo, with a heavy gray cloth covering his entire body. The juxtaposition of the folkloric dance drums and the music of Peking opera accentuates the contrast between the shamanistic movements of the woman and the immobile Stone, and this contrast apparently could be read as the dialogue between the young Taiwanese culture with the old and unchangeable tradition of Chinese culture. The shamanistic wild and vulgar movements of the red dancer reveals a typical Lin Xiuwei’s Nu Wa mode of energy.

It is the forceful creativity in Nu Wa, the goddess, which brings forth Lin Xiuwei’s two most religious but also most abstract dances, The Life of Mandala in 1988 and Back of Beyond in 1991, both of which demonstrate abundant fluid images of human life as perceived by Lin Xiuwei. The religious orientation in Lin Xiuwei’s work, according to her, began with the accident of Zhou Kai, a member of the Cloud Gate who joined her group as light technician but died during the premiere of The City of Desire in 1986. Lin Xiuwei fell into a long stage of depression because of Zhou Kai’s death, and started to meditate the meaning of life and death. Hinduism revealed to her the wisdom of the world of the mandala. From The Life of Manda1a and Back of Beyond, we see how Lin Xiuwei tried to present the world of the mandala, the transformation of the images of life on stage. Both dances are abstract compositions of various images with no story line to support the images. The Life of Mandala, according to Lin, presents the process of life through images of the human body, desires, passions, sufferings, struggles, wanderings, finally arriving at the stage of the awakening. Likewise, The Back of Beyond transmits through human bodies the images of water, fire, earth, wind and emptiness, as well as sentiments of love and hate, states of birth and destruction.

Lin Xiuwei said that to her the various forms of Buddha are the external manifestations of Vairocana, dharma-kaya, and this realization led her to see the nature of creativity of art. Through meditation, and through empathy, she communicates with and enters into the states of all elements in the world, the rock, the wind, the sea, the weed, and thus discloses through artistic creation the hidden facets of life. For Lin Xiuwei, there is no difference of gender, but there are various forms of the outer space which link to the “cell” of the inner space. Lin Xiuwei takes her dance texts as the Mandala, with the garbhodbhava, defined by Lin as the masculine principle, as well as the vajradhatu, defined as the feminine principle; through the artistic realization, all images of life can be presented in a variation of forms. Nu Wa, the generating force from within, serves as the center of creativity.

Lin Xiuwei once said that each performance on stage is like a process of life experience. The dancers have to have very high power and sensitivity to be able to remain alert in the state of ecstasy, to be able to control their own physical state, to explore the images revealed within their bodies, and to experience the interactions with other dancers on stage. Lin likes to dance in the dade, and she also demands her dancers to practice in the dark, and to face the movements of the inner light and inner breath of their bodies. Lin stresses the mental.stage between being asleep and awake: to keep oneself physically and mentally sensitive to time and space one must discard prejudices and habitual movements. She said,

 

The so-called "body space” should include the outer space of the great universe, as well as the inner space of the human microcosm. Some choreographers display the outer space in polities, society, family, room, desk or chair. Some try to transform them into absaact forms of coiors or lines. For me, the difference between reality and mirage, between larger space and smaller space, is relative.... I want to convey the message that part of the human body is independent, and full of wonders. (Between Asleep and Awake” Program of the Back of Beyond)

 

Lin also said that the experience of life, the memories of the body and the dreams would all be collected within the body. Through exploring inward, one movement would lead to the next and an inner geography of images would appear. Therefore, Lin Xiuwei also insisted that dance is an anti-intellectual art. The dancer needs to know how to meditate, and not how to think.

Lin Xiuwei has compared herself to a witch, a priestess with wisdom and power and self-control. Through dance, she wants to deliver the visions she perceives through her body. She has also made the stage a space of sacrifice and demanded her dancers to offer their entirety through the ritual of dance. Lin Xiuwei’s theory of the stage explains her theory of artistic creation: one has first to empty oneself, to offer oneself to the space of the flow of creativity, so that one can allow various forms and shapes to come out through one’s body. This mystic interpretation of the dance experience, once again, shows a gap between Lin Xiuwei’s theories and her highly stylized and calculated dance choreography.

 

V. The Paradox and the Power of the Celture of the Goddess

 

Tao Fulan and Lin Xiuwei, contemporary woman dance artists plus choreographers plus theorits, have developed quite distinctly unique forms of dance of their own, while sharing fundamental similarities in terms of the religious dimension of their art and their theories. Both compare themselves to priestesses, or goddesses, or witches, when they discuss their roles as dancers. Furthermore, they employ highly religious vocabulary in presenting their body language, explaining their dance theories, and conveying the mysticism of the ritualistic elements of the dance experience. Finally, because dance is the art of the human body, both tend to take dance as a form of anti-intellectual art.

Coming from the contrast between Tao Fulan’s two stages of choreography, from the inconsistency between Tao’s theories of the inner energy and her religious dances, also from the gap between Lin Xiuwei’s anti-intellectual theories of dance and her highly-stylized and calculated dance form, we face the crucial question about the distinction between dance performance and religious ritual.

Tao Fulan and Lin Xiuwei seem to equate the art of dance with religious ritual. But, dance, like all other forms of art, is not to deliver religious doctrines, nor the ritual to lead the audience to be converted. There is no form of expression which could be situated in the void isolated from the symbolic system. The body language of the dance still belongs to some sort of language system, and in all dance texts, we can detect the traces of one or the other sort of language system. Therefore, it is actually a common fallacy to take dance as purely a form of the body art and thus anti-intellectual. The choreographer’s quotation of the gestures or poses in religious paintings or sculptures, or the borrowing of the tradition of ballet, of the surrealist’s object art, or the referring to the political situations, are all ways of using various symbolic systems. If there is no sense of dialogic distance from the frame of the language system the artist uses, it then becomes an art confined and spoken by the ideology behind that symbolic system.

Also, even though both Tao and Lin put stress on the fiction o f meditation and thus on the need to avoid the interference of the intellect, still we see clear patterns of design in their dance texts. The impulse to present plastic images through a connection of movements is inherent in the art o f dance. Tao is especially good at combining her body with a collage of surrealist objects and thus creating a unique rhythm of movement. In recent years Tao insisted to give up the “thinking body” and to move into ritualistic piety, but consequently she draws herself away from her body, and away from the object art which could effectively channel the inner drives of her creativity. We noticed from the path of her creative career, that what she now resists to is the political Same of mind and the cultural root-finding in which she once was so deeply immersed. Therefore, her stage of spiritual quest is a stage resisting the political positions, resisting the identity fixations, and a statement of the new birth of a culture of her own, a culture of the goddess. But, paradoxically, along the way of her spiritual quest, through imitating the gestures of the goddesses, she has placed herself on the shrine of the goddess to be worshiped, arid thus her position and her goddess image have been fixed.

As to Lin Xiuwei’s dance, though she also insisted that the flow of movements come from within, with no intellectual structure, we still could see her design, her interpretation and intervention as a choreographer. Lin Xiuwei is especially good at designing difficult poses for her dancers, and the constant flow of movements makes the images change 6om one facet of human life to the other. From Lin Xiuwei’s The Myth of the Late 20th Century, to The Ritual of Deities in 1991, and Obsession of the Stone in 1993, and even through the two highly religious and abstract dances The Life of Mandala in 1988 and Back of Beyond in 1991, we see the life force of Nu Wa rising up through the forms of Taiwan folk culture and a down to earth energy, which has deviated &am the Central Land culture and has matured into a new form of culture of her own.

The “oriental” signs of religious icons used by contemporary choreographers in Taiwan carry different significance from conventional signs of the Orient. Contrary to what the signs of the Orient are to the West, the oriental icons incorporated by Taiwanese artists in their dance texts serve two different functions: the first function as signs of interstices that both introduce and reject the memories of the past Chinese culture, as Lin Huaimin did in his Dreamland and Nine Hymns, and Tao Fulan did in her Happy Birthday or Alice in the 0'onderland, or Lin Xiuwei did with the music Peking opera in The Passion of the Stone; and the second function as the signs which embody local and marginal culture, especially through the images of the goddesses, again as what Lin Huaimin did with his priestess-mother-witch in his Nine Hymns, or Lin Xiuwei’s Nu Wa. This tendency toward the margin, toward the local, is actualized through the ritual of the goddess. The signs of the goddesses are picked up from the shamanistic folk religion and linked with the cult of the procreation and turn out to be a performative trope of the subversive voice against the patriarchal canon of the Chinese tradition. The ritual of the goddess, then, becomes the kinetic rhetoric to renew the Taiwanese culture, to generate the rebirth of the culture, through the feminine energy.

To come to a conclusion, what is the intimation of the power of the goddess to Taiwanese artists? Lin Huaimin uses the icon of the goddess to display his call for the renewal of Taiwanese culture; but the cult of the goddess also reveals the paradoxical aspect behind itself. If the goddess is placed on the shrine and worshiped by the artist, then the goddess is fetishized, fixated and cannot change her forms; likewise, if the artist takes herself as the goddess, she cannot create new forms of art either. When the goddess is fixed in her image and on the shrine, the worshipers are fixated too at one and the same position. No new forms of culture can be generated if the artist and the reader are both fixed at their ideological positions. To my mind, the true significance of the culture of the goddess does not lie in the contours or shapes recorded in religious icons, not in the ritualistic stabilizing elements in the chanting, and not in the authentic existence of any goddess, but in the energy of life and in the complexity of changes a goddess would offer, and in the space of in-betweenness of movements and stillness. Just like what Tao Fulan said, as a woman artist, one has to search with sensitivity for one’s own unique artistic form and language, or like what Lin Xiuwei has suggested, dance is like the various external expressions of the dharma, and dancers present the human emotions and human conditions through the images of their own bodies. Art creates and also discloses the hidden reality in life. Contemporary theatre artists in Taiwan are inclined to seek inspiration and strength &om folkloric goddesses, but be it Tao Fulan or Lin Xiuwei, or other artists, they have to continue to break the images they have formed and to explore through their own bodies and their inner energies in order to bring forth new forms of art and thus a new culture. Otherwise, we would see merely a temple of the goddesses, without new forces in the culture.


Works Cited

 

Berger, Pamela. The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectresspom Goddess to Saint. Boston: Beacon, l 985.

Billington, Sandra. & Green, Miranda, eds. The Concept of the Goddess. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. Foreword by Joseph Campbell. New York: Harper 8c Row, 1989.

- - - . The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult Images, London: Thames and Hudson, 1974, Rpt. 1996.

Gold, Thomas B. “Civil Society and Taiwan’s Quest for Identity.” Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan. Ed. Steven Harrell & Huang ChQn-chieh. Taipei: SMC Publishers, 1994. 47-68.

Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988.

Graham, Lanier. Goddesses. New York, London, Paris: Abbeville Press, 1997.

Hurtado, Larry W. Ed. Goddesses in Religions and Modern Debate. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1990.

Kinsley, David. The Goddesses’ Mirror: Visions of the Devine porn East and West. New York: State University of New York, 1989.

Koritz, Amy. “Re/Moving Boundaries: From Dance History to Cutural Studies.” Moving JYords: rewriting dance. Ed. Gay Morris. London & New York: Routledge, 1996. 88-103.

Lin, Huimin. Xu, Kaichen, Si, Huiling. On the Nine Hymns. Taipei: Minsheng News, 1993.

Lin, Xiuwei. “The Magnetic Field of Life: the Images of the Body in the Mandala.” Program of the Life of Mandala. Taipei: National Theatre,1995.

Liu, Joyce Chi-Hui. "Palace Museum vs. Surrealist Collage: Two Modes of Cultural Identity Construction in Modern Taiwanese Ekphrastic Poetry." Chung-wai 0’en-hsie. 25.7 (1996): 66-96.

- - - . "Re-Staging Cultural Memory in Contemporary Theatre in Taiwan: Wang Qimei, Stanley Lai, and Lin Huaimin." East Asian Cultural and Historical Perspectives: History and Society, Culture and Literature. Ed. Steven T5tdsy de Zepetnek and Jennifer W. Jay. Alberta, Canada: Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, 1997. 267-7S.

Lu, Jianying. “Dancing across half of the century, letting the body tell the history: the fifty years of Taiwan Dance.” Performance Art 33.7 (1995): 4-21.

Morris, Gay. Ed. Moving 0’ords: rewriting dance. London & New York: Routledge, 1996.

Neumueg Erich. The Great Mother: An Analyais of the Archetype. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Princeton University Press, 1963.

Olson, Carl, ed. The Book of the Goddess Past and Present: An Introduction to Her Religion. New York: Crossroad Press, 198S.

Peng Ruijin. “Wu Zhuoliu, Chen Ruoxi, the Orphan of Asia.” 0'enxuejie 14 (1985): 93-104.

Pollack, Rachel. The Body of the Goddess: Sacred wisdom in ~th, Landscape and Culture. Dorset, Massachusetts, Queensland: Element Books, 1997.

Tao, Fulan. The Book of Dance. Taipei: Wanxiang Publisher, 1994.

- - - . The Book of the Body. Taipei: Wanxiang Publisher, 1996.

Waghorne, Joanne Punzo. & Norman Cutler, eds. Gods of Flesh, Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of Divinity in India. Cambridge, PA: Anima Publications, 1985.

Zhong, Baoshan. “A Overview of the Dance Culture [in Taiwan],” sushi 0'enyi. 8 (1993): 62-98.

   



[1] In my previous two papers related to this project, "Palace Museum vs. Surrealist Collage: Two Modes of Cultural Identity Construction in Modern Taiwanese Ekphrastic Poetry" (1996) and "Re-Staging Cultural Memory in Contemporary Theatre in Taiwan: Wang Qimei, Stanley Lai, and Lin Huaimin" (1997), I discussed the concentric mode and the eccentric mode of cultural identity construction respectively in modern Taiwanese poetry as well as in modern Taiwan theatre. The second paper leads to the idea of this current paper.

[2] China, literally meaning the “Middle Kingdom,” and the so-called “Central Land culture,” are named so in contrast to the “barbarian” tribes or the provinces located at the margins of the mainland. In past history, Taiwan was referred to as “southern barbarians.” Though being descendants from the mainland through immigration during the past three hundred years, people in Taiwan have developed a sense of local community and of resistance to the “Central Land” and, resulting from it, of a unique Taiwan identity. Among many studies which have dealt with the “quest for a unique Taiwan identity,” Thomas B. Gold (1994) could provide some background information for western readers. Gold has pointed out that, in contemporary Taiwan fiction, music, film, dance, theatre, and scholarship, there are marked similar themes such as the awareness of rootedness in this place, nostalgia for local folk arts and architecture, a flood of publications on Taiwan’s history, and political awakening of the general public (61-64). Gold concludes that, in the 1980’s and the 1990’s, “defining Taiwanese identity is still a process at the stage of rediscovering a history comprised of a diverse array of components, but it has become a conscious project”

[3] Cf. Berger’s The Goddness Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint, Billington & Green’s The Concept of the Goddness, Gimbutas’s The Language of the Goddess, Hurtado’s Goddesses in Religions and Modern Debate, Kiasley’s The Goddesses' Mirror: Visions of the Devine from East and West, Neiimaan’s The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, Olson’s The Book of the Goddess Past and Present: An Introduction to Her Religion.

[4] Before Lin Hriaimm established the Cloud Gate Dance Ensemble in 1973, there were no formal modern dance groups in Taiwan. The first stage of the Taiwan dance culture was dominated by the traditional Chinese ethnic dance which the Ministry of Education started in 1952 to encourage organizing national contests of traditional Chinese ethnic dance (Zhong Baoshan 63).

[5] In recent history, Taiwan has experienced two drastic turn-overs of government, through military force and high political oppression, first from the hands of the Chinese government to that of Japan in 1895, and then from Japan to the KMT government which retreated from the Mainland to Taiwan in 1945. Wu Zhuoliu’s novel lee Orphan of Asia, written in the year before the ends of the Second World War and the Japanese Colonial period, reflects the ambiguous cultural identity of the Taiwanese jammed between Japan and China, and the anxiety of being disowned by the Mother Country. Peng Ruijin has pointed out that the “Orphan consciousness” revealed in Wu Zhuoliu’s novel has deeply touched the sensitivity of all Taiwanese, and even become the name which represents every Taiwanese (1985: 94). I have pointed out in my previous paper ”Re-Staging Cultural Memory in Contemporary Taiwan Theatre” that the desire for recognitioo by China revealed in the “Orphan Complex” through Taiwanese literary imagination has been changed into an urge for the re-construction of a new identity in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

 

[6] The story of Hanshi is about Jiezhtui in ancient China who would rather be burnt in the woods to death to show his loyalty to his old master than leave the place and serve a new lord.

[7] In my paper "Re-Staging Cultural Memory in Contemporary Theatre in Taiwan: Wang Qimei, Stanley Lai, and Lin Huaimin," I’ve suggested that the half-transparent screen in Dreamland serves as a performative trope of interstices, with the inscription of the double vision of the tradition juxtaposed with the post-Modern, through which the artist and the audience find a space to re-locate their position and relation with the past, which is actually severed through the disrupted perception caused by the screen. 

[8] Qu Yuan’s (B.C. 329-299) poetic elegy Nine Hymns is composed of eleven sections; the first nine hymns are the chants by shaman priests and priestesses to incite the god to descend and take physical possession of themselves, the tenth hymn a lament for soldiers who have died for their country, and the eleventh, a fragment of a funeral dirge. Lin takes only six parts out of the first nine hymns and keeps the tenth and the eleventh. He apparently does not seek to re-construct this classical ritual, but merely borrows the form in order to exercise his own ritual of incantation and requiem.