Cloud Gate is the name of the oldest known dance in China. In 1973, choreographer LIN Hwai-min adopted this classical name and founded the first contemporary dance company in the greater Chinese-speaking community. In 2020, CHENG Tsung-lung succeeded LIN as the company’s Artistic Director, bringing together his creative works with traditional roots and excitingly innovative perspectives from the digital and globalized world. In 2023, Cloud Gate celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Cloud Gate
Dance Theatre of Taiwan
References
When you´re talking about Cloud Gate, "magic" is not too strong a word
Time Out
Talent and skill require no translation... it’s only right that they should be shared with the rest of the world
The New York Times
Cloud Gate
Cloud Gate dancers receive training in meditation; Qi Gong, an ancient breathing exercise; internal martial arts; modern dance; and ballet. Manifesting in choreographies, the company transforms ancient aesthetics into a thrilling and modern celebration of motion.
Cloud Gate has toured worldwide with frequent engagements at the Next Wave Festival in New York, the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, the Moscow Chekhov International Theatre Festival in Russia, the Movimentos International Dance Festival and the Internationales Tanzfest NRW directed by late Pina Bausch in Germany. International press acclaims the company as “Asia’s leading contemporary dance theater” (The Times), and “One of the best dance companies in the world” (FAZ).
CHENG Tsung-lung – Artistic director
CHENG Tsung-lung became the Artistic Director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan in 2020 when he succeeded founder LIN Hwai-min.
As a child, he sold slippers on the streets of Taipei, and his experiences of street life and folk and religious cultures have shaped a choreography known for its vivid engagement with the richness and diversity of human experience.
Praised by The Stage as a choreographer with “an eye for a cinematic moment,” CHENG has been honored with prizes internationally and at home and has collaborated with companies worldwide. Recent examples of his work in the Cloud Gate repertoire include 13 Tongues (2016), drawing on his experiences of street life and achieving over 100 global performances since its creation; Lunar Halo (2019), featuring a soundtrack collaboration with Sigur Rós, which was selected by The Telegraph as one of the “Best of 2023 Dance” and described as “a luminously and bleakly beautiful take on the internet-infested 21st century;” Sounding Light (2020), created in response to the isolation of the COVID pandemic; Send In A Cloud (2022), displaying a panorama of dancers’ personal journeys in shifting colors; and WAVES (2023), a collaboration with Japanese media artist Daito MANABE, exploring societal and individual facets affected by the rapid progress of technological advancements.
CHENG is a fixture in Routledge’s respected annual survey of leading dance practitioners, Fifty Contemporary Choreographers (2020), alongside the likes of William Forsythe, Akram Khan and other leaders in the field.
Productions
SOUNDING LIGHT
Sounding Light by Cloud Gate’s Artistic Director CHENG Tsung-lung is an ode to nature and a relearning of how to listen with our senses and minds during the pandemic. The choreography follows a day filled with sunlight interrupted by clouds and shadows. Dancers create a natural soundtrack with their voices, breath, and percussive bodies, offering acoustic and visual impressions of breezes, forest creatures, and flowing water.
This is CHENG’s first major work since succeeding LIN Hwai-min in 2020, illustrating Cloud Gate’s pioneering approach and CHENG's artistic vision. It offers a pure and captivating performance that connects the delicate balance between human civilization and nature.
WAVES – in Collaboration with Daito MANABE
WAVES, Cloud Gate’s latest creation, showcases the innovative collaboration between Artistic Director CHENG Tsung-lung and Japanese digital artist Daito MANABE. This groundbreaking piece blends meditative and oriental practices with Western dance, exploring the hidden realm of the body through AI-generated music derived from dancers' neural electrical signals converted into data. WAVES pushes the boundaries of human movement, offering audiences a fresh perspective on the fusion of dance and technology. The piece presents Cloud Gate's cutting-edge choreography to an international audience.
LUNAR HALO
The performers’ interaction with video design is often astonishing. You emerge into the chill night air as if having woken from a dark, exquisite, deeply unsettling dream. - Best of 2023 Dance/The Telegraph
Lunar Halo, created by Artistic Director CHENG Tsung-lung in collaboration with Icelandic band Sigur Rós, explores the changes that are shaping our world today, particularly our increasing reliance on communicating through new technology. Performing to a hauntingly ethereal soundtrack, the dancers interact with each other - in pairs, groups, or as an ensemble - as well as with multiple large LED panels that are filled with fluidly moving shapes, colors, and images.
After its European premiere at London's Sadler's Wells Lunar Halo received high praise from critics, also featured in The Telegraph’s “Best Dance of 2023” list. It recently had its French premiere in 2024 at the Montpellier Dance Festival, where it was acclaimed as the most enthusiastically received show of the year and lauded by Le Figaro as one of the festival's top three performances.
13 TONGUES
As a child in the 1980s Cloud Gate Artistic Director CHENG Tsung-lung would contribute to the family business by helping his father sell slippers on the streets of Bangka/Wanhua, the oldest district of Taipei. Bangka was known for its vibrantly diverse and bustling street scene that embraced religious and secular life, rich and poor, work and play, and legal and illegal activities. The young CHENG was transfixed by his mother’s accounts of the legendary 1960s street artist and storyteller known as “Thirteen Tongues” who had adopted Bangka for his informal stage.
It was said that “Thirteen Tongues'' could conjure up all the Bangka characters -- high and low born, sacred and profane, men and women -- in the most vivid, dramatic, and fluently imaginative narratives. Thirty years on CHENG’s fascination for “Thirteen Tongues” became his inspiration as he transformed his childhood memories into dance.
Beginning and ending with the sound of a single hand bell, the music accompanying 13 Tongues ranges from Taiwanese folk songs to Taoist chant to electronica. The stage is awash with projections of brilliant colors, shapes, and images and the dancers gather, interact, separate and re-gather in a thrilling representation of the clamor of street life. As the religious heritage of ancient Bangka/Wanhua fuses with the secular space it is today so time appears to dissolve. The spirit realm and the human realm also coalesce as the audience is taken on an immersive journey -- via imagination and storytelling that recalls the art of “Thirteen Tongues” -- through centuries of human endeavor, behavior, and belief.