Click here to watch Cloud Gate Dance Theatre perform

Something amazing tends to happen to people when they watch Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Essentially, the work of this acclaimed troupe from Taiwan fuses Western techniques and Asian traditions. And yet in the hands of its artistic director, the master choreographer Lin Hwai-min, this mingling of styles yields many different and elemental forms of expression.

On previous UK visits, Cloud Gate’s dancers have waded in mirror-like water or showered in a spray of dyed yellow rice. The last time they were in London they occupied an onstage bamboo grove. The discipline and mesmerising dynamics of their movement are such that a performance by Cloud Gate has the power, in the words of the Chicago Sun-Times, “to change your metabolism” .

“That’s what I’ve been working on,” says Lin, grinning. A cheerful, humble 60-year-old, he founded Cloud Gate in 1973. This was not long after returning to Taipei from America, where he had studied the methods of Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.

Named after an ancient ritual dance, Cloud Gate was the first modern dance company to emerge from a Chinese-speaking community. In its early days the company’s work drew upon Chinese opera, folklore, literature and contemporary Western styles. Then, after the lifting of martial law in 1987, Lin created productions looking at Taiwan’s sometimes painful past. Regardless of the subject matter, his dances were always gloriously visual.

“Nowadays I don’t work on the visual surface,” he says, “or from literature or politics. I work on chi, the energy. To me a performance is an exchange of breathing across the footlights. That’s what draws the people in.”

Cloud Gate returns to London next week with Wild Cursive, the final chapter in a trilogy of full-length dances inspired by Chinese calligraphy. Lin explains: “We always say that calligraphy dances. Every dancer knows it. Every choreographer wants to do something about it. But for a long time I said no, because I didn’t knowhow.” He began to prepare himself and the company more than a decade ago with “a gradual yet drastic change of direction. Cloud Gate used to do modern dance, ballet and Beijing Opera movement. But I wanted to go back to the source.” That meant traditional Asian physical disciplines including meditation and martial arts. “East and West are truly different,” Lin says. “Here’s a Gothic church, and here is the Great Wall. Movement in the East all starts with a low, squatting position. It’s very grounded. From the soles of the feet you draw the energy up to the point between your sexual organ and your a***hole.”

Initially, the dancers balked at the new regime. “They hated it! They did it because they had to. You have to understand that some dancers had wanted to be a Swan Queen since they were kiddies.”

Now they have adapted beautifully, says Lin. The results – Cloud Gate’s rice-laden Songs of the Wanderers, from 1994, and the abstract dance Moon Water in 1998 – were highly gratifying. “When their bodies were seasoned in strength and ability,” he says, “I realised that I could bring in the calligraphy.”

Lin refers to the first of the “Cursive” trilogy as respectful to the rules of calligraphy. The second operates on a lighter, more refined and spiritual sphere. Wild Cursive lives up to its name. “It’s supposed to be the highest form of a writer’s self-expression, craft and temperament. They no longer feel responsible for conveying the meanings of characters. They just let go.”

As well as practising physical improvisation inspired by calligraphy, the dancers took weekly classes in calligraphy “so that they could decipher the working of the brush and the energy behind it. Calligraphy,” Lin continues, “like movement, is an exercise of breathing. The brush works in a figure eight and so, too, the movement works in a spiral. But to me it’s not about the shape or the line. It’s about the energy left on the paper by those masters who danced holding a brush.”

Wild Cursive, Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 (www.sadlerswells. com 0844 4124300), Tues-Fri

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