NINE SONGS: FROM NATIVE TRADITION TO CONTEMPORARY CREATION

By Lin Hwai-Min
Presented at the Ramon Magsaysay Awardees’ Forum,

Ramon Magsaysay Center, Manila, 27 August 1999.

Nine Songs is a choreography I did to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan. It was premiered in 1993 and has been performed in Taiwan and Hong Kong, twice in Europe, and at the Kennedy Center and the Next Wave Festival in New York.

Reading some of the reviews, to my astonishment, I found many references to post-modernism, multiculturalism, post-colonialism and deconstructionism, none of which were suggested to me when I made the choreography. I am going to share with you some of the problems I encountered and some of the solutions I reached in bringing about Nine Songs.

Nine Songs comes from a cycle of poems of the same name by Qu Yuang, some 2,400 years ago. Qu Yuang is considered ‘the poet’ of China and Nine Songs, one of his masterpieces, is widely regarded as a symbol of the highest aesthetic in Chinese culture.

Nine Songs consists of eleven verses, but then, nine sometimes means many in Chinese. According to scholars, the verses were originally ritualistic songs. Exiled into the Hunan province, Qu Yuang observed the primitive rituals of the inhabitants there and wrote these songs. They speak of nature, life, love unfulfilled, the dark hours of loneliness and of honorable death—in other words, the entire cycle of life. According to scholars, in the original rituals the shamans would assume the role of gods and goddesses and carry the ritual through with songs and dance. The music and dance steps and even the form of the ritual has long been lost, but Nine Songs never ceases to inspire Chinese artists, finding expression in theatre, music, dance and other spectacles. In terms of dance, in recent years, using rigorous research and lavish costumes, some dance spectacles have also been staged. They have been attempts at recreating the ancient rituals.

I became obsessed with Nine Songs in the early 1980s as potential for choreography. I was moved by its rich metaphors and illusions of flowers, vegetation, and other elements from nature. I was also touched by its profound expression of emotion. Actually, the first nine verses are love songs, sad love songs, always lamenting that the lover never shows up, or if he does, the affair finishes quickly.

But I had a problem. I didn’t know how to deal with the tenth verse. It was totally out of step with the rest of the verses: it talks about war—soldiers fighting and dying for their country. Then it closes with the eleventh verse acting as an epilogue: “With the orchid flowering in the spring and the chrysanthemum in the autumn. The ritual has to be kept pure and perfect from year to year forever.” But what was the tenth song about? It is the only song that pays respect to mortals, while the others are about gods and goddesses.

In 1986 I visited Bali for the first time. Along with many Western tourists, I spent many hours at the Café Lotus (Ubud), overlooking the beautiful lotus pond, and I became one of the lotus eaters. It was in Bali that I discovered the world of Nine Songs, in which man and nature, man and deity, live in harmony through endless rituals of music and dance. I could almost smell the fragrance of the piece. But what about the tenth verse?

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and long after the bloody tragedy in Beijing, I found another door into Nine Songs. It rested entirely on that problematic tenth verse. Since the time when Qu Yuang wrote those poems until the end of the twentieth century, there has been a long list of songs in Chinese history which tell of people’s suffering, and yet the gods never come. I decided that this is what Qu Yuang was trying to say. Or that is how I interpreted it. All of the unfulfilled love in the first nine verses is preparing an accumulation of frustration which reaches the breaking point in the tenth: blood is shed and a war of attrition breaks out. Here it is finally human beings that are trying to help themselves while the gods never help. With that, I interpreted these very beautiful, lyrical poems into an allegory of contest, a contest against injustice: not necessarily against any particular government at any particular time, but injustice in the universal human situation. So, therefore, in terms of plotting the choreography, I started with that tenth verse and worked backward.

Being a sentimental person, I wanted a better ending, not just tragedy. I wanted a hope of renewal, therefore, lotus is brought into the landscape of the production. It is there not only to echo the metaphors of flowers as they appear in original texts, but also as a symbol of eternal life and rebirth, which appears in many Asian cultures. So with the set designer, I included gigantic lotus leaves, pink blossoms around the border and backdrops and used real lotus growing in actual water in the orchestra pit. In this way, I brought nature into the theatre, hoping that it would bring the audience into a space framed by the holy lotus, creating a holy ground for the ritual to take place.

Music chosen for the choreography includes Aboriginal songs, ritual songs from Taiwan, Japan, Java and India, and Buddhist Tantras by Tibetan monks. All of this music has wonderful breathing and a mesmerizing quality. As a member of the audience, you become onlooker of a ritual taking place in the theatre, but also a celebrant of the ritual. The only exception of the soundscape was for the tenth verse, “Homage to the Fallen” where I used percussion music created by wooden instruments that make sounds like the shooting of a machine gun. Woven through this percussive music is a long list of names recited in different dialects: the names of ancient heroes, soldiers killed in World War II, people killed in the massacres that took place when Japan colonized Taiwan and during the time when the Chinese Government came to Taiwan in 1947. In doing so, we cover the time from the ancient past to the present.

The scene of the homage is played against the background of the chaos of a riot. Then one young man stands tall, his arm raised high through a blazing light, and is killed. In the end, we bring in candles to offer consolation to the dead and to the audience. The dead rise again and the performance closes.

Movement is the crucial challenge in this choreography. Cloud Gate includes several disciplines in its training: Tai Chi, meditation, opera movement and modern dance. For Nine Songs, I emphasized some specific hand movements and the twist of hips to give the flavor of something of a remote oriental style. Even to me, this Chinese past is remote, very “oriental” in the sense of orientalism. To this background, I brought in elements of the past and the now, the East and West, to put into the one pattern, not necessarily to be in harmony, but to work against each other and to create some disturbing images.

People in contemporary dress travel through the action of the ancient ritual taking place on stage—in suits, on bicycles, even on roller skates—thereby creating a great contrast. I wanted to awaken the audience from the illusion that they are looking at a performance that is pretending to be a classical or an ancient ritual.