Fins, Finns and Crosshatched Dreams

I wonder what kind of dreams I’ll have tonight.

I’ve stroked the head of a fish. A carp, or koi in Japanese, I think. It looked like a huge pale goldfish. This was at Chun Tan (someone please correct me if that’s wrong), the oldest of the 52 hot springs in the lush hills above Taipei. Many fish were swimming about in a shallow pond, but only this one repeatedly came to the surface with its big mouth agape nearly every time I leaned in to dip my index finger in the water. Maybe it merely wanted to be fed, but it didn’t bite my finger. And maybe it wanted exactly the contact I had with it, which was to pet its smooth head for just a moment before it slipped smoothly away. But it kept coming back.

I think I’m in love. Does anyone know how you can tell a fish’s gender? (That sounds like the beginnings of a joke: ‘How do you tell a fish’s gender? By FILL IN THE BLANK.’)

This gender thing is important at the hot springs, at least at Chun Tan where men and women bathe separately. After…what, two hours, or was it more? I lost track of the time. What a luxury. Anyway, after immersing myself in hot, tepid and cold water, plus a few visits to the steam room, I felt like the proverbial new man. Or maybe, more accurately, I felt more like me. Or like a me I’d like to be more often: quietly revitalised and incredibly content within my body.

And then to top it off I make friends with a fish.

I regret being unable to see first-hand how being in Taipei influences the work that’s being made here during ArtsCross. I have this theory-of-sorts that seeing a dance in the place where it was made, particularly if the person or people who made it come from that place too, can offer insights into the work.

Location, location, location.

Finland’s a good example. I think you can gain a deeper understanding of Finnish dance by beating yourself with a branch inside a smoky sauna and then tottering naked into the nearby lake. Especially if it’s at night, or the nearest thing to night that the Finnish summer can offer. (On some evenings it remains so light that you could just about read a book.) There’s something about that combination of temperature and light and purification and awareness of nature that subtly and sometimes seductively permeates a good deal of the Finnish dance I’ve seen. It influences the way that people behave, too, and that in turn has a bearing on the dances they make in terms of methods, style and content.

It was good to go away from TNUA’s lovely, welcoming hillside campus and the splendidly intense creative isolation of ArtsCross just for a day. I actually did it two times.  The first was this morning, when it was my privilege to visit the riverside flat that LIN Hwai-Min calls home. Founder of both Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and TNUA, this pioneering sexagenarian is a bona fide cultural hero and veritable Buddhist rebel whose chief tool for change is art. For nearly forty years Mr Lin, as they respectfully call him,  has exerted — and continues to exert — a profound effect on dance and the people who make it or teach it or are interested in it in Taiwan. We talked and then went to lunch, taking a taxi to a Japanese restaurant (Kikugetsute, I think it’s called) in a busy location at the bottom of the same big, winding hill up which I was later driven to the spings and the unforgettable and touching encounter with my fine finned friend.

Uh-oh. I just realised that in the afternoon I ate both raw and grilled fish, and yet there I was in the early evening stroking one.

So what does all this have to do with dance-making at TNUA this summer? Not sure. Maybe I need to let that idea swim around in my subconscious overnight and see what, if anything, rises to the surface tomorrow morning.