ABSTRACT
I was sitting down one day with my Artistic Director, Rudi van Dantzig, and he was talking about how, when he choreographed Monument for a Dead Boy, he was invited to be Director of a company in America. He said “If I had done that, it would have changed my entire life.” Then we got to talking about what countries it would be interesting to be in; what might be our wish. I mentioned Mainland China, and he said that wouldn’t be attractive to him, even though he is a Communist. A few weeks later our company got a call from Lin Hwai-min, who had made a connection with us through Joachim Schmidt, the European dance critic. Schmidt had seen the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre in Germany, been much impressed with it, and met Hwai-min. Just at that time Hwai-min was thinking to make ballet a stronger part of training in Taiwan, because to that point they were learning modern dance almost exclusively. He came to my house, we talked’til four in the morning, and he said “You ought to come over.” I said “Yes.” He said there would be a workshop that summer (it was’83), and so I went. We had more than a hundred students. I shared teaching and choreographing with some of the Cloud Gate members, and I loved it.
