Tonight, the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, which visited the NCPA four years ago, returned with Artistic Director CHENG Tsung-lung’s Send In A Cloud.

Send In A Cloud was created with inspiration from a streak of constantly changing sunglow seen inadvertently by CHENG Tsung-lung. At the early stage of rehearsal, all the dancers could only practise together online. The unprecedented online rehearsal inspired CHENG to adopt a new creative mode. The dancers live in different interior environments, where there are a variety of colours, looking much more colourful than the rehearsal room. They are in a state of life different from what we usually see. Their most realistic portraits are thus made visible. This time, CHENG Tsung-lung, who is accustomed to using his own life experience as a source of inspiration for creation, has started digging into the unique life story of each dancer and transforming their lives into different dance clips on the stage.

The entire performance consists of 12 dance segments, which seem independent but they are actually interconnected with each other. Yasuaki Shimizu’s music and Marcelo Anez’s sound design, combined together and echoed across the entire theatre. In order to make the stage visually richer, CHENG Tsung-lung gave a drawing lesson to each dancer, with CHOU Tung-Yen, a winner of the World Theater Design Award, and WEI He-ting, an animation designer, working together to processing the dancers’ paintings as part of the stage scenery. In terms of dance choreography, CHENG Tsung-lung came up with lots of fancy ideas, e.g., fishing lines are used to hang the sound device, which sways from side to side, causing a change in the sound field; at the end of the work, there appears a ray of sunlight from the depth of the stage, as if shining in all its misty splendour.

The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre will continue to stage Send In A Cloud until December 10^th to show the audience its “post-Cloud-Gate era” with exuberant youthful vitality and a unique new look.

Photos by LING Feng