Cheng Tsung-lung at SDC

Dancers of the Sydney Dance Company in Full Moon by Cheng Tsung-lung (supplied image)

By Elissa Blake  

Reserved but smiling frequently, Cheng Tsung-lung seems the quietly spoken type. But appearances can be deceptive, says the Taiwanese choreographer during a break in rehearsals for the upcoming world premiere of Full Moon, a work he has created for the Sydney Dance Company.

“Inside I have … how to say it …” Cheng turns to his costume designer and translator, Fan Huaichih, and whispers in Mandarin. She whispers back.

“A monster,” he says. “Inside I have a monster.”

It’s the monster that made him into a dancer, he explains. “When I dance this monster comes out and after I finish, I feel calm.”

At 40, Cheng is the artistic director of Taipei’s Cloud Gate 2, the development arm of the city’s world famous Cloud Gate Theatre, and one of Asia’s leading contemporary choreographers. Had he not paid heed to his monster, however, things might have been very different. Instead of being an artist, he would be running a shoe factory.

“My family owns a factory making slippers and when I was eight years old I was selling slippers on the street,” he says. “I was good at it. But it was illegal so every time the police came, I had to run fast.”

The streets around the slipper factory were Cheng’s playground and schoolroom. “My mother told me I had to go to the street and learn things from being among the people every day,” Cheng says.

It was a colourful neighbourhood. “A lot of characters. “There were the mafia guys and … women in sexy clothes …” He turns to his Fan again.

“Hookers,” she whispers.

“My school classmates would go to the movies but for me, the streets were my movies,” Cheng says. “Real life was my movie theatre – but without popcorn.”

Cheng Tsung-lung (supplied image)

Cheng is the first Asian choreographer to work with the Sydney Dance Company. He is showing the dancers how to slow down and “be more quiet”. It’s something he had to learn himself.

It was Cheng’s mother who hit on the idea of sending her eldest son to dance school, he explains. “I had too much energy so my mom sent me to the dance school at eight years old. I would use up all my energy in class and not bother her so much when I came home.”

The dancing came naturally enough and he enjoyed the discipline it imposed. But Cheng was no great shakes at regular school. By the time he was 15 he was bucking the system.

“Between class everyone sits down to prepare for the next one but I always went out to have a cigarette,” Cheng says. “And try illegal drugs.”

Marijuana?

“No, more heavy than that,” he says. “I was curious to do the things that made me feel alive, or feel like people were close to me.”

At 16, Cheng was arrested and put on a supervision and rehab program that required him to attend counseling sessions and work weekends at a government facility for children and teens without families.

“I helped feed these children and I played with them,” he says. “In that time, I totally changed my life. I saw that life itself was so…fragile.”

Straightened up, Cheng graduated from the Dance Department of Taipei National University of the Arts, but not before he was required to do his compulsory military service.

It nearly put an end to his hopes of becoming a dancer. Two years of standing stock still for hours holding a rifle left him with stress fractures of the spine. “Very hard training and not good for my monster,” Cheng smiles. “But you bury your feelings inside and do what they tell you to do.”

After finishing his degree, he performed internationally as a dancer with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan from 2002 to 2004. “In my generation in Taiwan not many boys wanted to do dancing,” Cheng says. “I was so tall and a little bit handsome so I was always dancing in the centre of things. I was the important guy on stage.”

He was noticed. Cheng became a Resident Choreographer for Cloud Gate 2, a company devoted to innovative work by emerging choreographers in 2006, and was appointed the company’s Artistic Director in 2014.

Cheng’s parents were slow to embrace his career, he says. “They wanted me to be independent and strong. That’s all they wanted for me. From age eight to 22, they approved of me dancing but after I graduated it was, ‘OK, people in the arts never make money, come back to the factory’. But I was like, no way, I can’t!”

Cheng says he’s impressed by the athleticism and speed of the Sydney Dance Company’s artists. Until now, he had only seen the company’s work in video clips, never in the flesh.

“They inspire me more than I thought they would,” Cheng says. “But physically, they are very different. Lots of energy. Asian dancers are more … restrained. These dancers are very open.”

Full Moon, Cheng explains, is a work inspired by the moon and its place in mythology and everyday life. “In Taiwan, the family will sit together and get together with friends to watch the full moon. It’s a very peaceful time. I wish to bring that kind of feeling to the stage here. There are many feelings we cannot describe in words that dancing can. Dance speaks to us deep inside. It brings us together.”

Full Moon is part of the double bill, Orb, playing at the Roslyn Packer from April 29, 2017.

This story was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on April 28, 2017.