I attended a performance of "Wild Cursive " at Cal Performance in Berkeley California. Wild Cursive is the Final Chapter of Cursive: A trilogy performed by Taiwan's premiere Cloud Gate Dance Theater. Choreographer, Lin Hwai-min's scintillating blend of East/West dance style erupts into a brilliant mythic fusion informed by Kung chao "wild calligraphy." Wild calligraphy represents the pinnacle of Chinese cursive aesthetics in which rules are embraced and broken. -Thus freeing the characters and internal selves of the audience from any set form. To call "Wild Cursive" unique is an understatement; it needs to be understood experientially. As eyes and ears follow the hero/heroine journey of the dancers upon the stage the myriad experiences of our lives unpeel. As the dancers come closer and closer to expressing absolute purity of form/nonform, deep levels of the soul respond.
From a vantage point in a side balcony box, high above the stark beauty of the stage; the drop hundreds of feet below into the stunning graphic simplicity of the stage took my breath away. As Cal Performance describes in their introduction to the dance, "The Cloud Gate dancer's spellbinding movements echo the serpentine lines of black ink as it flows down cascading streams of rice paper onto the stage." Embrace beauty, says Princess Haiku, it is everywhere.
This video clip is of an earlier performance, "Cloud Gate."
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