‘Songs of the Wanderers’ Converts Rice to Metaphor

The most authentic and purposeful human movement in Lin Hwai-min’s dance spectacle “Songs of the Wanderers” takes place after the curtain calls when Wu Chun-hsien slowly, steadily rakes into concentric circles the two tons of rice that have fallen on the stage floor throughout the 90-minute performance--a final action that creates order out of chaos, a classic design from random scatterings.

The piece itself, however, is something else: essentially a grain distillery manufacturing spiritual moonshine. Although Lin’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan danced it faultlessly in its American premiere on Wednesday at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, it’s the rice you remember: rice used metaphorically as sand, rain, a waterfall, a river and a pathway.

Like his functioning lotus-pond in “Nine Songs” or his live peacocks in “Dreamscape,” Lin’s rice represents an event in itself: a novel visual conceit yielding genuine theatrical splendor and sometimes even power. But inventive and flamboyant pictorialism is as far as he goes. Creating and developing movement or really grappling with the daunting themes he chooses simply isn’t his game.

Again like “Nine Songs,” this 1994 suite examines pan-Asian identity--here by collecting and fusing religious practices. Accompanied by intense, atmospheric Georgian folk and church music sung, on tape, by the Rustavi Choir, the members of Cloud Gate perform actions drawn from various sects of Buddhism, Hinduism and other beliefs or practices.

These passages of whirling, rites of prostration and ceremonies mortifying the flesh involve an enormous amount of picturesque, generalized flailing and an even greater overload of picturesque, generalized rice-fireworks: the dancers sending huge sprays into the air (and sometimes into the front rows) by flinging it, kicking it or sprawling into it.

The result combines two parts Rice Capades to one part Hollywood-style asceticism: rituals of self-denial in which everyone looks enviably well-fed, freshly bathed and meticulously groomed. We see the accomplished Lee Ching-chun lashing her long, long hair in feathery cascades at the end of what is depicted as an exhausting pilgrimage. (Miraculous: Try wandering an Asian road in the heat of day without your hair turning into a sodden clump.) We also watch bare-chested guys energetically beat themselves with evergreen boughs, wincing and flinching in pain yet leaving not a scratch on their well-toned torsos. If it were only this easy. . . .

Meanwhile, on the left side of the stage, Wang Rong-yu stands motionless in prayer for the entire 90 minutes while a stream of rice pours down onto his head and shoulders, forming a mound at his feet. The dancers assume postures of meditation; he meditates. They portray endurance; he endures. They look hectic and temporary; he looks deeply peaceful and makes “Songs of the Wanderers” redundant by embodying the very thing that Lin strives so mightily to synthesize: the eternal spirit of Asia.

If you ignore the work’s thematic pretensions and look at it simply as dancing, you glimpse the gulf between Lin’s highly original concept and his awfully meager choreographic resources. Where butoh dancers take one process or cycle from the natural world and explore it so exhaustively that they magically seem to become what they are depicting, Lin characteristically tries to camouflage his very short attention span through catalog formats (gods-of-China, religions-of-Asia) and special effects.

Unfortunately, those effects can seem empty or diversionary with no strong dance expression underpinning them. For example, after we’ve seen Mark Morris make the act of hurling handfuls of snow into a supremely musical extension of his dancers’ actions in “The Hard Nut,” all the flying rice in “Songs of the Wanderers” amounts to mere decoration, nothing more.

Lin’s most respectable moment as a maker of dances comes not in the evening’s big showpieces--the portentous fire procession or engulfing rice-monsoons, for instance. No, it occurs earlier, in a duet that is quickly doubled and expanded: the men holding long wooden branches diagonally in the air and the women reclining on those branches while the tinkle of tiny bells adds a sonic complement to the unhurried evolution of gymnastic dance images.

None of this proves Lin a contemporary master or makes up for all his pointless grain-drain, but it shows him putting movement together with genuine skill. It’s real dance, with the lifts conveying a true sense of wonder. And in a project searching desperately for a spiritual center, any sign of hope ought to be celebrated.

* Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan performs “Songs of the Wanderers” tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m., Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, 12700 Center Court Drive. $20-$32. (562) 916-8500.