Cloud Gate’s Meditations on a Field of Rice

Ballet companies travel with truckloads of toe shoes and tutus. Modern dance companies bring their own paraphernalia. Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, for example, brings 2 tons of rice to Cerritos on Wednesday for the opening of Lin Hwai-min’s “Songs of the Wanderers.”

“We use the rice as a landscape or a mountain or water, like a river,” Lin said in a recent phone interview from company headquarters in Taiwan. “Sometimes it looks like a desert.”

And as the dancers go through their paces in the 90-minute work, a monk steadfastly stands downstage in meditation as a stream of rice trickles over his head “like sand pouring down from an hourglass,” Lin said.

“It’s the source for the whole piece.”

Clearly, Lin, choreographer with the company since its founding in 1973, intends more than entertainment.

“The piece is about religious rites,” he said. “These people are really on a pilgrimage, if there’s any kind of narrative to the work. But basically it’s about life. The piece creates the atmosphere of a church.”

At the end, a man rakes the rice into a spiral, into a kind of Japanese Zen garden. The section is called, symbolically, “Finale or the Beginning.”

“It really makes many people cry,” he said. “I don’t know why. Not in Taiwan. In Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg or Norway, people tend to cry over the rice. People here are very quiet.

“People who saw it Europe, after the performance, maybe 200 people would stay on in the audience to watch the man work.”

Lin, who turns 51 on Thursday, found inspiration on a 1994 pilgrimage to Boddh Gaya, the northern India village where Buddha is believed to have attained his ultimate enlightenment while meditating under a banyan (or Bodhi) tree.

“I went during the monsoon season,” Lin said, “and it was so beautiful. I came home with a very beautiful sense of quietness. The whole piece is very spiritual and very quiet and very slow in a way.”

The slow pacing emerged from the months of meditation the company did before they even took a step.

“After the meditation, I asked the dancers to keep their eyes closed and let the energy direct their bodies,” Lin said. “That’s how the basic movement materials were created.”

A search for appropriate music turned up nothinguntil he heard a homemade tape of Georgian folk songs: “That’s it!”

The quest for a crisp copy of the old recording proved equally frustrating.

“Then in ‘94, we went to New York on tour, and I searched all the basements of record stores for five afternoons. The day of departure, I remembered there’s a Russian bookstore there. I called, and they put me on hold me for 20 minutes. ‘Yep, we have it.’ ”

Lin describes the music as simple, mostly singing. “It sounds religious and almost Islamic. It has such a warm spiritual quality.”

Perhaps because he had mulled over the idea for several years, the piece came together rather quickly over a few months.

“It was a gift from Buddha. . . . Later, we modified it here and there. We do that all the time. When the dancers are capable of doing more, I demand more from them.”

Unlike his earlier “Nine Songs,” danced by the company in Cerritos in 1995, “Songs of the Wanderers” demands no sweeping acrobatics or dazzling technical movements. Instead, attention is focused on “the subtle movement of the core of the body.”

The piece moves very quietly and slowly but intensely, Lin explained.

“In Boddh Gaya, there is a wonderful river, especially in the monsoon season. Then it’s thick with mud. You sit by it and feel that the river is not moving at all. It looks like beautiful brown carpet,” he said.

“Then you understand there is life underneath. That’s a metaphor for this piece. The dancers are moving every second, but on the surface they are not doing any kind of ‘visible’ movement. Really there is a flow of energy through the whole piece. But it comes all together like a river.”

* The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan will dance Lin Hwai-min’s “Songs of the Wanderers” Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. $20-$32. (800) 300-4345.