Not dancing, but swimming

The dancers perform in a trance-like state

By Sarah Buckley BBC News Online

Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre's latest production - Moon Water - looks more like swimming than dancing.

Using a unique fusion of tai chi and classical ballet, the dancers melt into each move with incredible control, flowing, as though through treacle, from sculpture stillness to combative martial art movement.

The movements are reflected above and below

This smooth yet devastatingly strong motion is as it should be in the traditional Chinese discipline of tai chi. The ideal state of tai chi practitioners is described as: "Energy flows as water, while the spirit shines as the moon."

The director of the work, Lin Hwai-min, explains that the dancers "don't attack the movement like in ballet, they just initiate that impulse and the rest will follow.

"Many (of the) dancers really swim through the whole journey of the performance".

Grounded in Bach

The result is certainly startling. The dancers, picked out in flowing white silk against a mirrored black floor, unfurl themselves into exquisite shapes, their muscles rippling as they move.

They are accompanied by haunting Bach cello compositions, which Lin chose, he explained, because they provide an expansive bass line which provides the dancers with the grounded weight necessary for tai chi.

The movement looks effortless, but is actually the result of a fearsome discipline. The dancers meditate before they go on stage and they dance most of the performance with their eyes half-closed.

"I tell my dancers: 'When you dance you don't think - that is thinking, not dancing,'" Lin says.

Centred

He explains that the dance should actually flow naturally from the body's central energy - or chi. The dancers don't consciously move, but "just initiate that impulse and the rest will follow".

The dance climaxes with water seeping onto the stage

The movements look inhumanly taxing, but Lin says that, unlike ballet and modern dance, which Cloud Gate also perform, the tai chi dance rarely results in injury. When the dancers become knotted up, they "meditate and tai chi cures it".

The element that differentiates tai chi from other traditional dance, however, is the emphasis on breathing.

Lin stresses that this in itself is precious in a world in which we are so busy, "we don't even allow time to take a breath".

And this is what is so moving about Moon Water. Rather than compelling us with narrative, and in addition to thrilling us with beautiful lines and shapes, it conveys the breath of life itself.

On occasions during Moon Water the dancers' fingers could be seen fluttering. It looks like part of the choreography, but Lin says it is not by design - it is just chi seeping out.

The piece climaxes with the stage slowly flooding with water, as if the dancers' energy has had the power to even summon nature.

Moon Water is at Sadler's Wells, London (0207 863 8000) until 1 June and at the Prague Spring Festival from 5-7 June.