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DAVID BELLAN talks to Lin Hwai-min, founder of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, about performing Moon Water

Lin Hwai-min, Cloud Gate's now legendary founder, came late to contemporary dance after studying Chinese opera movement and classical court dance in Japan and Korea.

"I fell in love with dance when I was five after seeing the movie The Red Shoes 11 times!" he told me. " But I didn't have any early dance training. I started as a writer, and when I was working on my master's degree at the University of Iowa I was also taking modern dance class, and two or three months later I started choreographing.

"Starting late, I was never a technician, but I took my body apart and put it back together again as a dancer, but I never danced professionally in the US. I went home to Taiwan and, being young and stupid enough, I started a company. We stumbled and we struggled, but I never expected then that we would become an internationally known company.

"Cloud Gate is named after the most ancient, legendary dance of China, which is supposed to have existed 5,000 years ago. We are the only contemporary dance company in all of the Chinese speaking countries."

I also met Lee Ching-chun, who is Associate Artistic Director, and has been a dancer with the company for many years. She told me more about the early days.

"There was no dance at all in Taiwan, and nobody knew what a professional company looks like, or what contemporary dancers are. They just knew about Chinese dance, and dance that was simply entertaining.

"When the company started it was a group of dancers who worked for years without pay. The audiences had no idea how to behave at a serious dance performance. They would be eating and talking and taking photos, and there was an occasion when Mr Lin brought the curtain down and told the audience the show would not go on if they didn't behave better.

"At the start he had to teach himself everything about running a company and he had to educate the audiences in what the company is doing, blending Chinese folk legends with contemporary dance. Happily, the company has had very great success since then and Mr Lin is regarded as one of Taiwan's cultural leaders. We also have our own dance school now.

"Altogether there are now 20 dance schools in Taiwan with about 12,000 students. Apart from all our touring we also give free outdoor performances in Taiwan, and we get up to 50,000 people coming to see us in a large stadium. And all this has grown from Mr Lin's small company that he started 35 years ago. We also go into hospitals to perform for the patients who can't even walk to a show."

Moon Water is a highly original production and has quite rightly received rave reviews wherever it has travelled. It's set to movements, most of them very slow, from Bach's suites for unaccompanied cello, and is based on the eastern practice of Tai Chi.

The title derives from the Bhuddist proverb "Flowers in a mirror and a moon on the water are both elusive", and from a description of the ideal state of the Tai Chi practitioner: "Energy flows as water, while the spirit shines as the moon."

This is a minimalist work of great beauty. The dancers, in skimpy tops and flowing white trousers, move slowly through a series of set pieces which provide a sequence of ravishing images. The choreographer has not made the mistake of trying to illustrate the Bach with matching movement, but allowed the dancers to float over the music in a way that brings an artistic fusion free of subservience.

The set is unadorned and black until the later stages, when the backdrop is covered with a series of mirrors which show us the dancers from a different angle. Lin Hwai-min told me he got the idea when he was walking through the city of Munich and saw the pedestrians reflected in a row of mirrors above the shops.

Near the end the whole stage is flooded with water, perhaps an inch deep, on which the dancers continue the performance while they are also reflected in the ripples that they create. It's an intensely personal, introspective work, matching the feeling of the music - a meditation on which one feels a privileged intruder.

Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan are at Milton Keynes Theatre next Wednesday. For tickets call 01908 547500.

10:29am Thursday 1st May 2008

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