As a small boy in the early 1950s, Lin Hwai-min watched the classic ballet movie The Red Shoes 11 times. “I was very impressed with how high the dancers jumped and how they made those shoes do the monkey business,” he recalls. But his parents, intellectuals from an old, distinguished southern Taiwanese family, frowned on their son going into the arts, let alone something as lowly as dance.
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Lin secretly took ballet lessons, paying for them with money he earned writing short stories about adolescent frustration. At 14 he started studying the Peking Opera movements and the dances of Taiwan’s Tsao aborigines. His first exposure to modern dance came the following year when he saw Jose Limon dancing The Moor’s Pavane in Taipei. “I will never forget the moment when Jose put up his arms and leaped,” he says. “It was so breathtaking and new.” After earning a degree in journalism, Lin spent a couple of years at the University of Iowa writers’ workshop, where a required dance class plunged him into modern dance for good. “Though two anthologies of my stories had been published, I was not to write fiction again,” he says. He went to New York City, where he briefly apprenticed with disciples of Martha Graham–“she was too frail to teach”–and Merce Cunningham. But he realized he was “too old to become a professional dancer and too young to be intimidated by the hardship of a choreographer’s career.”
Lin’s imaginative, moody dances often commented on trends and social issues that concern the Taiwanese. Legacy, from ’78, tells the epic story of pioneers from the mainland who endured tough times centuries ago to build a prosperous nation. It’s now one of Cloud Gate’s signature works. “It was a theatrical response to the U.S. breaking ties with Taiwan,” he explains.
