Mr. LIN has accomplished what creative artists rarely succeed in doing today
:challenging the audience with a work unlike any other.－The New York Times

Honoring the Taiwanese choreographer LIN Hwai-Min with Lifetime Achievement Award, the jury of the International Movimentos Dance Prize, Germany, said: “As a foremost innovator of the dance, LIN Hwai-Min belongs in a row with artists of the century such as William Forsythe, George Balanchine, Birgit Cullberg and Maurice Béjart.”

LIN’s company, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, after wrapping up with a tour through Barbican Center in London, Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and the Winter Olympic Arts Festival in Vancouver, will celebrate the Taiwan International Festival with the world premiere of Listening to the River.

For more than 20 years, LIN Hwai-Min has been living by the Dan Suei River. The river is a major source of inspiration for his creative works. One of them is his masterpiece Moon Water, in which water literally seeps on to the stage. The new work Listening to the River breaks away from romantic lyricism, instead utilizes technology to express contemporary sensitivities.

On a bare stage, a stream of white scrim serves as the only set, onto which images of rivers in different temperaments are constantly projected. Against these poetic watery backdrops dancers twist and leap either in agony or ecstasy.

Close-ups of their bodies and movements captured by a cameraman on stage and those of flowing water merge into collages that are both surreal and haunting. At one point, a dancer helplessly watches his body being washed away by the currents.

Part real, part dream, LIN Hwai-Min’s new work seems to touch upon joy and sadness, fear and fantasy, life and death. Yet he says, the river never utters a word; it merely reflects landscape of the heart.

About the Choreographer

LIN Hwai-Min is the Founder and Artistic Director of Cloud Gate. Over than 36 years, he is heralded as “the most important choreographer in Asia” (Berliner Morgenpost) and “unchallenged giant in Asia . . . one of the greats of the twentieth century” (South China Morning Post, Hong Kong).