Taipei's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre is planning to stone a dancer in its next production. He will, even more impressively, be naked, blindfolded and have his hands tied while he is being pelted with rocks. Quite how you achieve all this without killing your company's desire and getting your show closed down is something artistic director Lin Hwai-min will sadly not be drawn into. He's a mild, peaceful man, given to hugging strangers and, when we met in Taiwan, in a state of near-hysterics about firecrackers going off around us. A good indication that we shouldn't look for cheap thrills with his Burning The Pine Branches, A Prayer for the New Millennium. So why the rocks? 'I do not believe the idea of the millennium,' he said. 'It's just an idea created by man, it's elusive. We measure time but it flows on. 'For people time is often eternity for which rocks often become the symbols. We assume that rocks are eternal, but they erode eventually. It takes tens of thousands of years to create a rock but then it's gone.' His dancer, hopefully, will fare better and Mr Lin will get a chance to try out the whole thing before we see the production here at the Arts Festival next year. Taiwan's Government is ushering in the new era with the show which will open at 10.40pm on December 31 in the National Theatre. A monk on stage will begin burning pine branches. The fire will burn as the year turns. It is a Tibetan notion - when the pine branches begin to burn, someone is looking into the future. A watery-eyed monk, in this case. 'The whole dance is a prayer,' said Mr Lin. 'It opens with the smoke and closes with a naked pregnant woman sitting on the rock, watching which way the smoke is going. The dance is about uncertainty for the future, the elusiveness of our own lives, their happy moments and their crucial points. So we have great contrasts, tender moments and cruelty, but in the end it is a prayer.' He draws on Buddhist ritual to explore the uncertainty and anxiety, dreams and hopes of mankind, he said. Mr Lin is a great fan of Tibetan culture, even if he has only been to Tibet once. What stayed most strongly in his mind was Tibet's rocky, barren landscape and the many prayer flags flapping in the wind, tantras written on the fabric. 'So our set is made up of silk and hundreds of rocks.' He has been thinking about the show for two years, but was delayed by work in Cambodia. When he returned to Europe to join his company on tour he found 'the day I got there I couldn't take modern Western society - it was so full of good, material wealth. There was a long spring, trees were in blossom, and I remembered the minefields in Cambodia. And then I got to my hotel and turned on the TV and saw Kosovo'. 'The millennium is just another sunrise for me. Human beings' effort alone is not enough, prayer is needed. We have East Timor and tragedies like this recur - there is no end. It depresses me but I cannot write an editorial through dance. 'I can only express my agony through sentences and I'm afraid that we may be creating a new Jerusalem for the next century. I just have this artistic craziness about how I say that.' Mr Lin's works are ethereal, often performed in slow motion, with a strange, heart-stopping beauty, dances of contemplation and meditation. They contain traces of everybody in Western choreography from Pina Bausch to Paul Taylor. Burning continues a spiritual journey towards purification and tranquillity amid typical Lin music: Tibetan chants. His dances are not always peaceful. In his acclaimed 'Songs of the Wanderers' he tipped tonnes of saffron-coloured rice on his 24 dancers. A steady stream of rice fell on a lone monk throughout the production. His are Eastern creations drawing from, but not diluted by, contemporary Western influences, so the man inspired largely by the classic ballet film The Red Shoes - 'I saw it 11 times' - uses everything from tai chi to meditation to the stylised acrobatic movement of Chinese theatre. Mr Lin founded his dance theatre in 1973, naming it after a 5,000-year-old Chinese ritual dance. He was recently offered directorship of one of Europe's major dance companies - he won't say which - but he turned it down. 'How could I leave Taiwan. My dancers are friends, part of the family. I know their lives, their joys, their problems. It's out of this that I create.' Burning The Pine Branches. February 18 to 20, 8pm. APA Lyric Theatre. Tickets cost $100 to $330. Call Urbtix: 2734 9009
