Miroirs de Vie is the emblematic performance of the Legend Lin Dance Theatre. This Taiwanese company was founded by choreographer Lee-Chen Lin with the aim of safeguarding the vitality and memory of the country’s original cultural identity through dance. Lee-Chen Lin began to gain recognition as a teacher and choreographer in the 1970s, creating mass performances for hundreds of people and solo productions. Despite the appreciation shown by audiences and critics, she paused her activities for several years to focus on her family, only to return to choreography, concerned about the decline of traditional arts in her country overwhelmed by the invasion of Western culture.
Miroirs de Vie is a work from 1995, celebrated in Europe at the Avignon Festival in 1998. Two years later, the choreographer was invited to the Lyon Biennale, where her piece Hymne aux Fleurs qui passent won the Prix du Public. Miroirs de Vie was re-staged by Lee-Chen Lin in 2006 at the National Theatre in Taipei. The source of inspiration is a Daoist outdoor ceremony, the Jiao, which takes place during the Ghost Festival in the seventh lunar month when the angry spirits of neglected dead are allowed to return to the world of the living. Lee-Chen Lin grew up in the city of Keelung, where the Jiao has been practiced for centuries: the beauty and hypnotic power of the ceremony are intimately hers.
The search for origins and the worship of the land as a “sanctuary of the soul” take shape in a performance constructed with respect for popular and religious rituals: an aesthetic of suspended time where dance, enveloping costumes, colors, and careful gestures convey the echoes of great distant stories through a close connection between theatrical forms passed down through generations and the faith in purifying rites.
