RICE AS A SYMBOL OF LIFE.

RICE AS A SYMBOL OF LIFE CLOUD GATE DANCE THEATRE OF TAIWAN BAM'S 2000 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL HOWARD GILMAN OPERA HOUSE, BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC BROOKLYN, NEW YORK NOVEMBER 1-5, 2000

When the curtain rises, all we see is a thin stream of pale golden rice falling from overhead, stage right. Light follows the trickle slowly downward to reveal performer Wang Rong-yu standing, eyes closed, hands in prayer. The shower of rice, symbol of life, is raining onto the shiny dome of his shaven head. Wang remains in motionless meditation, rice piling up around him, for the entire eighty-minute duration of choreographer Lin Hwai-min's Songs of the Wanderers.

Meanwhile, the other twenty-one dancers of the troupe move in ultra-slow motion on a symbolic ritual journey, inspired by novelist Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Mounds of rice onstage create a mobile landscape. The performers' relentless slowness calms our eyes and expectations, allowing choreographer Lin to create magical transformations.

In the opening section, "Holy River," dancers in beige rags, carrying long gnarled branches, gradually populate the stage through slits in the black rear curtain; they become a mass of humanity, constantly flowing toward us. Then suddenly the men are together; diving into the mounds of rice, scattering them, and the women are clumped behind them, a gargoyle of rippling arms and torsos.

Periodically, a stooped figure with a long-handled hoe (Wu Chun-hsien) wends his way across the space, smoothing the rice, which becomes by turns sand, snow, soil. Georgian folk songs sung by the Rustavi Choir accompany these very Asian rituals, yet the Russian music doesn't seem incongruous. Chang Tsan-tao's miraculous lighting bathes the spectacle in a warm glow that changes mood through focus, angle and intensity, but remains radiantly golden.

Shattering the serenity, a huge load of rice plummets from above with a crash, and a nearly naked Wang Wei-ming emerges from the mound, as if he'd actually dropped with it from thirty feet up. In his cathartic solo he flails and tumbles, kicking bright golden arcs of rice into the air. In another abrupt change of pace, five men appear with dishes of fire, which they balance on the heads of five women who kneel on neat squares the hoe-carrier has cleared in the rice carpet. The flames glow golden in the darkness, at once purifying and potentially dangerous. Then another shimmering torrent of rice pours down. Dancers writhe and cavort in it, toss handfuls into the air, and collapse in ecstatic prostration.

As the curtain falls, an overwhelming ovation greets the performance. After numerous curtain calls for the cast, the man with hoe slowly rakes the rice into an infinite spiral, This fifteen-minute epilog, titled "Finale or the Beginning," holds us rapt. When it's done, we slowly file out, transformed by this highly theatrical, deeply spiritual experience.