Cloud Gate Dance Theatre returns to BAM with WATER STAINS ON THE WALL (photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)

BAM Next Wave Festival
Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 12-15, $16-$50, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.cloudgate.org

Since 1973, company founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre have been presenting elegant, exquisitely choreographed shows centered around meditative movement inspired by Taoist and Buddhist philosophy and ancient culture, incorporating traditional, contemporary, and classical dance in mesmerizing ways. The company has been appearing at BAM’s Next Wave Festival since 1995, in such elegant productions as Moon Water and Wild Cursive. This week they’re back in Brooklyn with the international premiere of Water Stains on the Wall, a seventy-minute multimedia work that explores Chinese calligraphy, with music by Toshio Hosokawa, lighting design by Lulu W. L. Lee, projections by Ethan Wang, costumes by Lin Ching-ju, and set design and choreography by Lin. Lin will also give an Iconic Artist Talk on Thursday night at BAM Rose Cinemas at 6:00 ($20), moderated by Rachel Cooper, as part of BAM’s 150th anniversary celebration.

Dancers appear to float on clouds in WATER STAINS ON THE WALL (photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)

Update: On a slightly tilted white stage resembling Japanese rice paper, sixteen dancers slowly move about, sometimes in unison, sometimes individually, as black and gray inky, shadowy splotches drift across the floor like clouds. All of the dancers but one exit, leaving Su I-Ping to perform a brief solo, soon joined by Yang I-Chun. Through a prologue and seven sections over the course of seventy minutes, dancers slowly come and go, at times breaking out into smooth, fluid movements, waving their arms, lifting their legs, almost as if they are calligraphic letters come to life. Identically garbed in diaphanous, translucent, floor-length billowing pants and either bare-chested (seven men) or in flesh-colored leotards (nine women), the performers never once come into contact with one another, each a single, individual part of the whole, floating on the formations below them — which often evoke memory and the past as much as clouds — as Toshio Hosokawa’s compelling score shifts from electronic noise to minimalist percussion and piano. The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Water Stains on the Wall, inspired by a legendary Tang Dynasty tale about calligraphy, is another breathtaking presentation from one of that country’s most popular companies, which has been bringing their mesmerizing works to BAM’s Next Wave Festival since 1995. “Brooklyn in late autumn can be freezing and wet, especially in comparison to Taipei,” company founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min explains in a program note, “but to all of us in Cloud Gate — BAM is a center of warmth.”