From December 7^th to 10^th, the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre will return to the NCPA after a four-year absence and make an appearance at the NCPA Dance Festival 2023 with Artistic Director CHENG Tsung-lung’s new masterpiece Send In A Cloud. On November 15^th, the founder LIN Hwai-min and current artistic director CHENG Tsung-lung attended the press conference, sharing a touching story about the 50-year history of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and how they produced this dance work.

In 1973, LIN Hwai-min founded Taiwan’s first contemporary dance company, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, and named it after China’s oldest dance “Cloud Gate”. By combining the traditional Chinese culture with modern humanistic ideas and multiple dance vocabulary, the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre has developed its unique dance style in its own body language featuring both Eastern and Western techniques. Many dances created by the founder LIN Hwai-min, enjoying great popularity, have been staged again and again, becoming a memory shared by two or three generations of the locals.

In 2009, the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre made its first visit to the NCPA and performed Cursive, a graceful dance, making itself a hot topic in dance circles. Cursive also became a work that formed ties between the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and the NCPA. The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s classic dances, including Songs of the Wanderers, Nine Songs, Moon Water, Rice, White Water, and Dust, as well as Cloud Gate 2 New Voice of Cloud Gate, Oculus, Come, and 13 TONGUES, have been staged one after another.

In 2020, CHENG Tsung-lung took over as Artistic Director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Pouring new ideas into the Theatre, Cheng Tsung-lung is hailed as a fresh and distinctive voice in the international dance circles. In 2020, he was listed among the “Top 50 Contemporary Choreographers” by Routledge, along with Akram Khan, William Forsythe, etc.

Send In A Cloud, to have its premiere at the NCPA Opera House on December 7^th-10^th, will take the audience to a bright, spacious world through a surround sound field designed by Marcelo Anez, who has won the Grammy Award for four times, to the accompaniment of Bach Cello Suites played on the saxophone. In response to Bach music and dance movements, CHOU Tung-Yen, a winner of the World Theater Design Award, and WEI Ho-tin, an animation design master, have made gorgeous projection pictures out of staggered projective patterns and lines. The dancers swim in wavy music, now sinking, now emerging, moving fast as if flying. Body curling up and straightening drastically, they perform stunts on the stage full of colourful illusions. That’s what we know as Send In A Cloud, a pleasant and dreamy dance - as if rending the dark like the rising sun.