If you have attended a Kuang Huan performance over the past several years, it is hard to dispel from your mind the image of a group of nearly nude dancers moving on a stage slick with baby oil. What made them think of using baby oil? What new paths will Kuang Huan be sliding onto?
On a bare stage covered with baby oil, the slippery dancers move through a kaleidoscope of poses, and one cannot tell if their skin is glistening with sweat or oil. Seven or eight oil-coated dancers slide over each others' bodies, colliding, separating, and coming together again to form new interlocking poses.
In the next moment, the stage becomes busy with movement. A dancer bounds onto the stage, suddenly loses his balance, and falls down; another dancer comes rushing forward, and slides perfectly under the arch created by the first dancer's body. In the piece entitled "Penetration," dancers run, collide and fall in a state of exhilaration.
In Kuang Huan's latest production Oil Painting, choreographer Liou Shaw-lu uses baby oil as canvas and dancers' bodies as brushes, painting the stage in vigorous and spontaneous strokes. There is no story or plot, only pure exploration of movement.
Qi, body and mind
Baby oil has brought fame to the Kuang Huan Dance Circle, and has practically become their trademark. When Kuang Huan was established 13 years ago, however, things were much different.
Liou Shaw-lu, who is Kuang Huan's guiding force, was originally a student of physical education. While at university, he developed an interest in modern dance under the influence of Professor Liu Feng-hsueh. Professor Liu remembers Liou Shaw-lu as a diligent student who displayed a passion for creative pursuits early on.
Liou later became one of the founding members of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, dancing with them from 1976 to 1986. During his eighth year with Cloud Gate, Liou and his wife Yang Wan-rung, who was also a Cloud Gate member, established the Kuang Huan Dance Circle and began to explore unmapped territory.
They chose the name "Kuang Huan" because it was pleasing to the ear. In the beginning, they followed in the footsteps of Cloud Gate, producing such tradition-inspired works as 1986's large-scale Farewell, My Concubine. "The name has an impressive ring to it," says Liou. He gradually discovered, however, that although he choreographed dances on a variety of different themes, they were all similar in that their movements were combinations of martial arts and modern dance, or ballet and Peking opera.
Liou next set out on a new stage of experimentation, "theme and variation," in which he explored the vocabulary of pure body movement. Yet he still felt that something was missing, and asked himself the question: "If all plot and emotion are removed, what remains?" When Kuang Huan ran into difficult financial and creative straits in 1990, Liou left to pursue graduate study in New York, placing the dance troupe on temporary hold.
Liou entered the graduate program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, where he majored in Dance. New York's diverse and vibrant dance environment provided him with new inspiration. Many of the works he was exposed to at that time showed Asian influence, e.g. the incorporation of elements of aikido and taijiquan into "contact improvisation." As a result of these experiences, Liou began to search for his true roots.
Following the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, Liou choreographed the short work Seven Hermits, which was inspired by the traditional Chinese story of the Seven Wise Men of the Bamboo Grove, and derived its movements from the forms of taijiquan. This work was quite successful, receiving high acclaim from New York dance critics. Liou felt that he had discovered a viable path, and thus renewed his practice of taijiquan and other forms of Chinese kung fu he had studied during his undergraduate physical education studies.
"When I was young and hot-tempered, I did not take my martial arts practice seriously; but now that I have entered middle age, I have come to understand its value," says Liou. He discovered that martial arts movements not only provided elements which could be incorporated into dance, but were also capable of transforming the body and mind.
After returning from New York with his MFA degree and restarting the Kuang Huan Dance Circle, Liou drew upon his extensive practice of taijiquan, qigong and yoga, and made "qi," "body" and "mind" the troupe's new guiding principles-when free circulation of the qi (breath or vital energy) is achieved, a person becomes light and nimble, and develops a greater sensitivity toward nuances of space and time; body refers the physical body, and mind to one's thoughts, will and intentions.
"We ordinarily exert too much will in guiding our bodies, so I placed mind last because I didn't want to start from emotions or thoughts, but rather to let the body tell one how to move, like children playing games without fixed forms," explains Liou, an unaffected smile complimenting his clean-shaven head. The ultimate expression of qi, body and mind is adherence to the rhythms of nature and a return to the peaceful and unrestrained state of wu-wei (non-action) extolled by the Taoists. Although these concepts may seem mysterious, Liou's "baby oil series" expresses them in a clear and direct manner.
The genius of baby oil
In the 1992 production Dance Over the Universe, Kuang Huan's secret weapon-baby oil-appeared for the first time. As expected, it made an eye-catching spectacle-dancers with shaved heads, bodies nearly naked so they can slide freely; with the baby oil as a catalyst, linear motions become scarce and are replaced by continuous sliding, twisting and rolling.
Baby oil completely transformed the relationship between dancers and stage, creating a unique experience for audiences. This new type of performance not only attracted considerable attention in Taiwan, but also received high acclaim overseas. Liou's signature work Olympics, for example, won rave reviews in Tokyo and New York, and was enthusiastically received by audiences during its run at the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany.
Olympics is composed of a series of nine short baby oil pieces, ranging from gymnastic tumbling to graceful movements reminiscent of water ballet. At times, the movements of the dancers are uninhibited; at other times, they suddenly transform into statue-like poses. In 1997, Olympics received the "Award for Innovation in the Performing Arts" from Germany's Ludwig Foundation.
Liou's inspiration to add baby oil to his choreography was truly a stroke of genius.
The art of falling down
One sweltering hot day while Liou was studying dance in New York, the floor was slippery with sweat, causing him to collide with his improvisation partner and spin in a circle effortlessly three times. Although this experience lasted a mere two seconds, it made a deep impression. After returning to Taiwan, Liou experimented together with other dancers, first covering raincoats with water, and having everyone slide over them in bathing suits. He proceeded to experiment with olive oil and peanut oil, but found that they were smelly and insufficiently slippery. When Liou finally tried baby oil, he obtained the results he was looking for.
Dancing on baby oil proved to be an entirely new experience. Because baby oil creates a nearly frictionless surface, even walking normally on it is impossible. It was as if the dancers had returned to their infancy, first learning how to crawl and tumble, climbing gradually to their knees, and finally rising uncertainly to a standing position. The first thing that new dancers in Liou's troupe learned was how to fall down-by quickly curling up in a ball when they lost their balance, it was possible to create the appearance of a serious fall, when in actuality they were fine.
While baby oil imposes serious limitations, it also brings great freedom. Many dance skills become useless in this environment, and dancers must effectively start from scratch-but many new possibilities also arise.
Think for a moment how different swimming is from moving on solid ground, and how being suspended in water creates an entirely different range of motion. Baby oil creates a similar environment-dancers become nearly weightless and unable to roam about freely, relying on contact with their partners to achieve forward motion. Solo dancing and flashy moves disappear; by pooling their energy and providing support to each other, the dancers become sensitive to their mutual center of gravity and transformations in space. In this manner, many seemingly impossible moves, similar to "borrowing force to exert force" and "moving a thousand pounds with two ounces" in taijiquan, become possible.
Group improvisation creations
Dance emphasizes group effort, and rehearsals are no exception. Liou's dance routines are created through group improvisation, which he films on video, edits, and turns into choreography. It goes without saying that familiarity and mutual sensitivity among the dancers is vital to this type of dance improvisation.
"We are all fairly quiet people," says female dancer Chen Su-fen. As there are few solos, these dancers are not the type who crave the limelight. Moreover, because they are a small group and always dance together, there is no contention for top spot.
It seems surprising that these unassuming people can create such avant-garde works. Also, because they are so scantily clothed, they often give rise to sexual associations in their audience.
"Our dancers are not striving for techniques which will allow them to leap higher or spin longer, but rather expressing themselves physically on stage and developing their bodies' hidden potentials," says troupe leader Yang Wan-rung. Sometimes, slippery with oil, they slide, twist and stretch out on the floor; other times, they climb up onto scaffolds, hang ropes from them, and swing through the air. Yet because there are no precedents for the use of baby oil in dance, it is still a highly experimental field, and can produce a feeling of insecurity in dancers.
A search for Asian forms
As Kuan Huan Dance Circle's philosophy of qi, body and mind makes use of taijiquan, qigong and yoga in exploring the origins of human movement, dance critics have referred their works as a search for an Asian form of physical expression, comparing them to Lin Hsiu-wei's Tai-gu Tales Dance Theater and Tao Fu-lan's Tao's Dance Theater. Yet the choreographers themselves feel that their styles and intentions are quite different.
Lin Hsiu-wei, who formerly danced with the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, later established her own Tai-gu Tales Dance Theater. Her aim was to have dancers explore the themes of deep thought and meditation, returning to the primal void of the universe or the metamorphosis of an embryo in a search for the intrinsic nature of the body. Tao Fu-lan, who completed dance study in the United States, has put forward the philosophy of body, mind and spirit, which emphasizes "lifting restrictions on the brain"-silencing the brain's incessant dialogue and using ritualized movement to achieve a state of mental purity. In contrast, Kuang Huan does not take emotion or thought as its starting point, and while it emphasizes Asian forms of movement, its imagery is strongly influenced by Western art. The feature which these three dance troupes do hold in common is that they no longer rely solely on Western modern dance techniques, but rather explore other possibilities for physical expression.
Ku Ming-shen, chairman of the Dance Department at the National Institute of the Arts, believes that the exploration of new forms of physical expression is a common goal of the new generation of dancers. Nevertheless, she still has some reservations, "The experiment has not yet come to a finish-if you first set forth your philosophy, what happens when it fails?" As for Asian forms of physical expression, Ku believes that with today's high rate of cultural exchange, it is difficult to distinguish what is Asian from what is Western. She prefers to call it a "collaboration of East and West."
Liou Shaw-lu, on the other hand, sees no discord in his philosophy of qi, body and mind. He feels that because life is breathing, the whole thing is really quite simple. "I don't have any grand sense of mission-otherwise the audience would end up out of 'breath' (qi)," says Liou. He hopes that his works can bring pleasure to audiences, and allow them to enjoy dance in an unencumbered state.
Chung Ming-te, a professor in the Drama Department at the National Institute of the Arts and artistic consultant for Kuang Huan, holds a high opinion of Kuang Huan's playful exploration. He believes that paring down dance to its most basic elements and stripping it of story and message can transform the stage into a purified space, and that transparent and formless baby oil, which becomes one with the dancers, makes possible the pure form of expression which modern dance has been seeking.
In actuality, as early as the 1950s American dance circles began to rebel against the intense narrative style of modern dance master Martha Graham, setting out to explore pure movement without story or plot. Merce Cunningham, who was once Graham's top prot嶲*, began a long collaboration with modern musician John Cage, in which they explored the possibilities of pure movement. They created an ambiguous relationship between movement and music in their works, thus adding random and unknown elements to dance performances.
The "Foolish Old Man of Dance"
Although the "baby oil series" has presented audiences with an entirely new visual experience, viewing several works in the series reveals a high level of repetition in the vocabulary of movement. While this is a given in the establishment of a style, is it giving audiences a successive feeling of d嶴* vu from work to work?
"Ballet is still an active form after 300 years; baby oil makes possible an even greater range of movement, so why shouldn't it follow suit?" asks Liou. The modern painter Mondrian constructed his artistic world from simple red, yellow, black and white squares; and didn't Miro revel in a childlike, fairy-tale world?
Nevertheless, following an extreme path which does not allow for emotions can leave dancers with an empty feeling. During rehearsals for Oil Painting, the dancers took their technique to a higher level, learning to run and even leap on the oiled stage "just like stunt people." Some of the dancers, however, encountered mental barriers. It was their wish that such elements as feeling, atmosphere and lighting could be added to rehearsals in order to make improvisation more focused and add new color to their work. Yet Liou had no desire to add these elements, and for the present at least, his sole desire is to focus his efforts on abstract expression.
The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre has caused a creative stir in Taiwan's modern dance circles over the past several decades, and is still the most familiar troupe to many dance aficionados. But many of its founding members, Liou included, have begun to explore their own paths. Kuang Huan's experimentation with new forms of physical expression has been extolled for having great potential and taking modern dance in Taiwan to new heights. Liou has advertised the "baby oil series" as being free of complex or obscure meaning, taking it on frequent tours to rural areas in an effort to bridge the gap with audiences and make modern dance more accessible to the average person.
Liou, who is a native of rural Hsinchu County, enjoyed gymnastics, swimming and tree-climbing as a child, later making the transition from sports to dance. His many years of dedication to dance have won him the title of the "Foolish Old Man of Dance" (in reference to the Foolish Old Man in a Chinese fable who moves a mountain through perseverance). At this stage, Liou is thus even more firm in his resolve to continue along the path he has pioneered.
Doesn't the delicate fragrance of baby oil bring back childhood memories and make you curious to try this new form of dance yourself? Perhaps modern dance is not as complex as many people think.
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Kuang Huan Dance Circle has made a new start over the past few years, introducing their "baby oil series," which explores the possibilities of rhythmic movement, providing audiences with a unique visual experience. This photo is a scene from Oil Painting. (photo by Lee Ming-hsun)
Liou Shaw-lu and Yang Wan-rung, a dancing couple who have willingly made sacrifices for their love of dance, have dedicated their lives to running the Kuang Huan Dance Circle.
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Most of Kuang Huan's works are created through group improvisation, which Liou Shaw-lu films on video, edits and turns into choreography.
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It seems surprising that such unassuming people can create such avant-garde works. Also, because they are so scantily clad, they often give rise to sexual associations in their audience.
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Lin Hsiu-wei, who formerly danced with the Cloud Gate Theatre, later established her own troupe, Tai-gu Tales Dance Theater. Her aim was to have dancers go beyond Western dance technique to explore different artistic conceptions and forms of physical expression. The photo is a scene from The Back of Beyond. (photo by Chen Shao-wei)
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The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, which has completed over a thousand stage productions, often uses dance to interpret Taiwan's position in history. It is one of Taiwan's most representative dance troupes. The photo is a scene from their recent work Portrait of the Families. (Photo by Hsieh An, courtesy of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre)
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The "baby oil series" contains no story or plot, only pure exploration of movement. Other stage elements are also reduced to a minimum, making it a search for the essence of modern dance. The photo is a scene from Oil Painting.
It seems surprising that such unassuming people can create such avant-garde works. Also, because they are so scantily clad, they often give rise to sexual associations in their audience.
Lin Hsiu-wei, who formerly danced with the Cloud Gate Theatre, later established her own troupe, Tai-gu Tales Dance Theater. Her aim was to have dancers go beyond Western dance technique to explore different artistic conceptions and forms of physical expression. The photo is a scene from The Back of Beyond. （photo by Chen Shao-wei）
The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, which has completed over a thousand stage productions, often uses dance to interpret Taiwan's position in history. It is one of Taiwan's most representative dance troupes. The photo is a scene from their recent work Portrait of the Families. （photo by Hsieh An, courtesy of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre）
The "baby oil series" contains no story or plot, only pure exploration of movement. Other stage elements are also reduced to a minimum, making it a search for the essence of modern dance. The photo is a scene from Oil Painting.
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