Last August, members of the Asian American Press (and about four dance writers) were invited to a press conference onstage at the Auditorium Theatre at Roosevelt University. Heads of state from the Auditorium, The Joffrey Ballet, and The Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago stood in a line downstage with the petit Lin Hwai-min as, one by one, they announced how exciting March, 2014 was going to be.
Why? The three organizations pooled an immense amount of resources and personnel into presenting Lin’s company, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, and bringing his iconic work Songs of the Wanderers (1994) to Chicago. Along the way, the Alphawood Foundation joined on as lead sponsor for the endeavor, and before we knew it, Cloud Gate ads were appearing on CTA buses, billboards, and just about every page of the Internet (or so it seemed). Even with the many months of anticipation, time slipped away, and March signaled the arrival of Mr. Lin with his troupe of dancers, not to mention 3.5 tons of golden Taiwanese rice in tow.
To say that Songs of the Wanderers coming to Chicago was exciting is an understatement. Dance audiences were giddy with anticipation, and the show was so successfully marketed that many unfamiliar faces appeared at the Auditorium Theatre on March 14th. Presented in only two performances, it’s hard not brag on what a rare opportunity it was to see the remounted work. Sadly, our Editor (slated for this review) was stuck in the massive shut down on Lake Shore Drive as the curtain rose on Sunday. Having what I thought was a rare opportunity at Friday’s performance to sit and watch, to absorb and accept, I took no notes. So what follows is perhaps more of a stream of consciousness that resulted from experiencing the performance as a patron rather than a critic.
It doesn’t hurt that Songs of the Wanderers is amazing. The story is the ancient tale of Siddhartha’s quest for enlightenment. The opening scene is a small stream of sandy, golden colored rice pouring from the sky to land squarely on the head of a monk in prayer. The monk would be in this position, with rice pouring on his head, for the entirety of the 90-minute performance.
At first, everyone is uncomfortable, though it’s hard to say why. It’s quiet, with the only sound being the white noise of rice on a monk's head. Gregorian chant creeps in softly in the background, and dancers carrying big staves emerge from upstage draping with Butoh-tempo walking. Audience members shifted frequently in their seats; lots of coughing, sneezing, and phones ringing ensued. Camera flashes went off, followed by ushers racing down the aisles - are we really so brutish about etiquette at a quiet dance performance, or is it just really (really) hard for us to slow down, pay attention, and be still?
As the audience settled in, it perhaps chose to emulate the monk on stage. We accepted our fate of sitting quietly, in a beautiful landscape, among like-minded individuals. Isn’t that how one gets to enlightenment in the first place?
Songs of the Wanderers is a lesson in patience. The world of Siddhartha was very different than the world Lin Hwai-min lived in when the piece was created in 1994. The world today is different still. Our attention spans are limited, our reactions are quick - we’re prone to boredom. But, as Songs of the Wanderers develops slowly, slowly, slowly, the audience is sucked into a mesmerizing slow-mo world. Then, about 88-minutes later, awakened by a series of massive rice drops from the sky - dancers bound through dunes of golden rice, calculatingly flinging it in arches overhead. And then it's over. After 90 minutes of trance like beauty, the audience rose to its feet, and then didn’t quite know what to do as a lone dancer remained onstage to create a coiling, life-sized zen garden. Perhaps by design, here again our patience is tested as the nearly 20 minutes of watching this guy rake rice in a circle forces us to sit in awkward, uncomfortable silence, and eventually discover the importance of ceasing to wander aimlessly, but rather to revel in purposeful stillness.