A week after seeing a preview performance of Einstein on the Beach and there’s still this feeling of having taken a trip to a 1976 sci-fi time capsule. An operatic spaceship. It was a four-hour train ride from Chicago to the Power Center at the University of Michigan, a venue that in mid-January was home to epic rehearsals of the show. “There’s no doubt about it,” wrote the University Musical Society in fervent pre-show emails. “This is a seriously historic moment.” Historic, yes, but like visiting a sepia-colored dream of some NASA engineer–after a particularly long day pushing buttons in big glasses and a comb-over. Smart, beautiful, disorienting, dated.

A lot of that has to do with the set. The biggest pieces roll onstage in grey plywood slabs, from the wings, with haze and smoke billowing out around them. Prison bars made of ribbons dangle from the battens and billow slightly from the gust of passing performers. Most of the color is flat shades of white, black and grey, with very little blending, and even when we are presented with the representation of an actual building, there’s no attempt to, say, carve a faux stone façade from Styrofoam. We’re very obviously looking at a painted backdrop. Even a giant wall of chasing light bulbs is literally made of old-school yellow globes, not something more modern like LEDs. And yet, that the setting looks like it came out of a Theater History Textbook contributes to its other-worldliness, and its modern meaning.

The scenic accuracy is deliberate. It’s been 20 years since the last re-staging of Einstein on the Beach. There was one in 1984, and again in 1992, when I was 5 and 13, respectively. Creators Robert Wilson, Phillip Glass and Lucinda Childs collaborated to ensure the creation of an accurate re-staging of the original. The work has been the subject of a PBS documentary and is said to have changed perception of modern opera.

This is clear from the production in a number of ways. That the endurance required from the performers is astounding. That aspects of its composition seem tired at this point, having been aggressively adopted into modern opera. That the whole piece is basically a 4.5 hour mental workout, demanding that you stay engaged while challenging you with endless looping chants of numbers, non-narrative speeches, robotic gestures, and straight-out goofiness.

In one of the strongest sequences of the piece, featured performer Kate Moran repeats a line describing an experience in a supermarket: “There were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them,” while slowly moving through space, changing costumes. In the original production, Childs was the featured performer who recited these lines on loop. In this production, Moran owns the text. I never got tired of hearing those lines–with every repetition, the inflection and meaning would change. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, always engaging.

The same is true, to a certain extent, of Glass’ music, in which choruses sing numbers that blend into sentences and words. It’s a little bit like listening to a kaleidoscope. The chorus sings from the pit, from a jury box onstage, in amorphous groups. Everyone wears suspenders, a white dress shirt, and slacks—an outfit stereotypical for Einstein and absolutely ridiculous for anyone else.

So here I am, sitting in a theater of a marathon length of time, watching a work with sets that look like they came out of a vault, everyone’s wearing suspenders and singing numbers, and the lead violinist is actually dressed like Einstein. People are puffing their cheeks out and reciting nonsensical phrases. There is a court scene. There is a caboose scene. There are several dance sequences. There is a visual theme of a bright white line. And all throughout, people are getting up to go to the bathroom as is necessary, because there isn’t any intermission.

It feels both glorious and totally insane—like a dream.

Which is kind of the point. In the PBS documentary, Wilson speaks of the work as depicting character, not narrative. Glass talks about trusting visual and psychological associations with Einstein as a basis for the work. Both acknowledge the German physicist as a powerful, almost godlike presence in their culture. With this devoted re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, Glass and Wilson claim their own territory within the word “godlike,” and the production celebrates not Einstein but the machinations and developments of its lead artists.

With just cause. Ever watch an old movie and think “Well, this is kind of cliché,” and then realize “Wait a minute—this is the thing that MADE the clichés”? That’s what watching Einstein on the Beach is like, for some of us who didn’t grow up in the atomic age, but are instead living in its hangover. For some of us who are familiar with the visual machinations of contemporary opera. For some of us who read about Wilson in our college textbooks and have seen Phillip Glass become the subject of sketch comedy. It comes with a kind of smirking respect. Like when you’re grateful for the incredible sacrifice your grandparents made but wish they’d stop talking about themselves at the dinner table.

So if coming back from this opera is like emerging from a 1976 Time Spaceship, it’s worth the trip, if only to appreciate the contributions of works past and the developments in the field since then. Makes you want to kiss the ground. A little.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Andy beat me to it, but I’m going to play the “single mom for a week because Perry had to suddenly fly to Qatar(!?) to play shakuhachi for Vangelis” card in explaining why I couldn’t get a moment’s quiet to think and write my own wrap up before today. (Seriously? Qatar? Tomorrow? But, I have so much dance to see this weekend.) Luckily a hearty stable of babysitters allowed me to maintain most of my planned viewing of last week’s insanely amazing offering of live performance events. Man, I love this town. Right? I mean, screw backyards and your own bedroom. This is where where risk breeds, craft thrives and greatness lives (and, finally, rests). And, I suppose that describes in very short form my week’s viewing.

Fresh Tracks 2011: Pictured Left to Right: Levi Gonzalez (Fresh Tracks Adivsor), Lorene M. Bouboushian, niv Acosta, Hadar Ahuvia, Saύl Ulerio, Yanghee Lee, Aretha Aoki, Marýa Wethers (Program Manager)

On Wednesday, I caught Fresh Tracks at NY Live Arts as they continued DTW’s signature program with a roster that heralded great promise for the kind of voices we can expect the new organization to foster in the future. It’s a subtle shift, but this round, I’d hope, represented how NY Live Arts might be able to bring a healthier range of artists to the proverbial table than some of the more recent versions. Fresh Tracks remains the quintessential showcase for emerging choreographers and provides vital boosts for these artists, not only by supporting them through the presentation of their works, but more importantly through the substantial Residency Program, still under Program Manager Marya Wethers’ and Artistic Advisor Levi Gonzalez’s skillful guidance, which includes almost 60 hours of rehearsal time, performance fees, commissioning funds and dialogue and professional development workshops. Getting in doesn’t necessarily guarantee sustained achievement or involvement in the field; that is up to each artist’s tenacity, but based on the show, I hope we see more from all of them.

Hadar Ahuvia‘s solo Class/icism opened the program. She explored a rich movement vocabulary based on her grandmother’s stroke and resulting paralysis. The dance is comprised of several short variations of a movement motif of threading between limbs, bending at the joints, rolling and twisting torso, and collapsing hips accompanied by short solo piano variations played on a small boombox placed downstage right. It is a lusciously compelling movement investigation sprinkled with bits of wry wit. Ahuvia plays off an examination of immobility with grace and a light touch, while engaging highly sophisticated physical research. Aretha Aoki, who I’ve worked with in the past, offered up a fraught examination of bided time in her The Turning of Events. She seems to spend much of the work alone although she is joined and shadowed by FT alumna Vanessa Anspaugh. There are also occasional bursts on stage or quick flitting passes through the space by Kristina Dobosz and Line Haddad who are clad in short, sparkling, pink skating tunics. A computer-generated, but South Asian sounding woman’s voiceover by Aoki’s collaborator Ryan MacDonald fills the work with a tone of quieted frustration and Aoki’s contracted gut and bent legs speak of deeply seated tensions before a final kowtowing bow acquiesces to larger forces.

Lorene Bouboushian

Lorene Bouboushian’s performance of her The White Lady guts flail gluttonous fail is an exercise in structured insanity and extreme performance. Seemingly similar in method to a solo by Grace Courvoisier that I saw and reviewed two weeks ago, Bouboushian mines both words and movement for their hidden agendas and exploits them to their fullest. She gives a virtuosic performance that unpacks white liberalism, sexual aggression, body image, and dance in viciously wacky ways. I want to see it again and I want all my friends to too. I wish I could give her to one of my sister’s for Christmas. It would be the best present eveRRR. Yanghee Lee’s Dusk is a personal presentation and rumination on her relationship with her deceased father. She begins seated on a chair holding a large drawing pad with words from a monologue she speaks about losing her father, being alone, her state of mind, etc. She pulls the pieces of paper off the pad, drops them to the floor, re-arranges them and dances with a studied liquidity and forcefulness, while singing along with the Korean song accompanying her dance. niv Acosta is on my hit list. Where he goes, I’m going to follow. This 23 year old, Dominican, transgender artist structured a quartet (with his mom yessenia acosta cunningham, Joey Kipp and Cason Bolton Jr) that provided me with great ammunition for my regular ‘contemporary dance is just white people getting their freak on’ debates with students. Acosta pulls from vogue, post-modern task-based practices, hip hop, disco, song, family, and film for denzel again. Somehow it is supposed to be inspired by the 1989 film Glory, I didn’t catch that, but it didn’t matter. His opening silent face-off, vogue-based duet with Bolton Jr., his song with his mom, his endurance structure with Kipp and a final downstage line-up where all four began to lip-synch a re-mix of Alice Smith’s Love Endeavour summed up to reveal a brilliant, new visionary for our field, someone as he says queering ‘brown involvement in performance’ in a way that speaks honestly and articulately from the here and now. His source materials, artistic treatments and casting are reflections of what live performance can be and who it can speak for today. Did I mention I love this city? Saul Ulerio performed a duet, of sorts, with FT alumna Mei Yamanaka. His an ocean in between begins with highly dramatic Wagner-ian Wagner music playing while the audience sits in darkness, the house lights come back on and the audience begins looking around to see if there’s some action behind them. We hear someone walking across the black stage and then following a thunderclap, Yamanaka slaps Ulerio across the face. She slaps him again. This was a, literally, striking moment. The force and sound of the slap were satisfyingly honest and I recalled a very physical, violent duet Yamanaka had performed at HT Chen’s Newsteps a few years ago. I was wondered if more of that was to come and, eventually, after quite a bit of swirling and avoiding one another, a bikini-clad Yamanaka walks in front of the languidly reclined, bikini-trunk clad Ulerio. At which point, he crushes the beer bottle he was holding in his hands, she gingerly walks on the crushed ‘glass’ and he returns with dripping red hands.

Paul Monaghan and Mathew Rogers (Niall Jones in background)

Thursday. Call me a fag hag, I’m in love with 4 gay boys. The gay cover boys Mathew Rogers, Paul Monaghan, Niall Jones, and Michael Ingle to be exact. After the performance of Cover Boy Tere O’Connor‘s latest, I felt dusted in fairy magic. And, I’m not using playful pejoratives to be wry. I want to attend to a very clear emotional experience I had with the pice because the exquisite care that O’Connor employs in his structuring of the work culminates in a deeply felt affection for the four people on the stage, especially Rogers who exudes a genuine warmth after performing physical pathos with an unrepenting sincerity that never approaches melodrama. I felt love. I felt included. I felt transported. I walked away feeling like I’d just ridden down the Mekong with these guys or maybe it was more like down the smaller, slower Russian River – landing in Guerneville, CA for some camping and intimate, low-key boy bars. Andy’s given a great review of the work already, so I won’t go into much recounting of details, but this work offered me something more than the incredibly detailed craftsmanship that Tere always provides. Like niv Acosta’s, and from Andy’s review I’d also guess like Kyle Abraham’s, this work opened up personal and political experiences in sophisticated and considered ways. In Tere’s hands, the personal and political aspects are not crutches or fodder. They are present and honest elements that are folded into a work that one can simply ride. I’m grateful to Andy for reviewing, because this work soaked its way into me in a way that makes analysis of it in a verbal or written way difficult. I’ll say this – GO. I know the shows tonight and Thursday at Danspace Project are sold out, but GO. They are releasing some now, but Go and get on the waitlist. If I weren’t still on domestic lockdown, I would go again tonight and I’d sit up close again and steep.

Friday. Okay, Cunningham. BAM. What’s to be said. The last stop on the Legacy Tour. There’s a New Year’s gig at the Armory, but basically, this was it. The end. I was exhausted, starving and managing a bronchial infection by this point. My generous colleague who shared her extra ticket with me and I made it just in time, running from the Open Lab that Dean Moss’s Live Art in the Visual Environment class performed, after throwing money at a babysitter for cab fare to get the ankle biters home and fed. But, I was there, putting in my time, paying my respects. Or, at least, that’s what I thought I was doing. “Okay, I’m here. It’s MCDC, at its end. I’m here for it. Don’t know if I’ll make it, but I made it.” And honestly for most of Pond Way was thinking “and I’m up here in the balcony, at the Opera House watching patterns and little people move around on the stage.” That’s not typically my preference. And, coming off of the intimacy and rich warmth of Tere’s piece in St. Mark’s Church, thought that this belief system was going to be strongly reinforced. I’m in it for the human-to-human scale, for the reminders of what it means to be live with other live beings in proximity. I’d rather see labor and effort and drips of sweat. But Rain Forest, Split Sides  and 2 intermissions later I was thinking “Jesus. That was I-N-C-R-E-D-I-B-L-E. What if I had missed that out of sheer laziness?” The company was beautiful. Seeing works that were created decades apart from one another and thinking of how Merce generated something like Split Sides while in his 80s was astounding. I was properly put in my place. Alistair Macaulay actually (shhhh don’t tell anyone I’m saying this) captures the program very nicely here. So, I’m not going into detail (plus I was just a civilian attendee and didn’t bother with notes).

It was so far from my Wednesday and Thursday, but by the end of my Friday I kept thinking: “God, I love this town.”

Popularity: 3% [?]

Back in 2003 I was fortunate enough to be working for Mark Russell at PS122 and got invited to accompany him to Austin, Texas for the Fresh Terrain Festival, which was kind of a beta-test for what would become Under The Radar. Fresh Terrain was my first exposure to a really great European-style arts festival and the line-up was exceptional. I’ll always be grateful to Mark for giving me that exposure and opportunity – not only that but he was incredibly generous in talking to me about the work afterwards. One of the works I got to see at that time was Diana Szeinblum’s Secreto y Malibu – to this day one of the most stunning performances I’ve ever witnessed. In 2008 I was fortunate enough to see Ms. Szeinblum’s Alaska at DTW. If you haven’t seen her work, now you can, in HD, at BAM on Mon, Dec 5 at 7pm.

The promo copy says:

Named after a place that everyone knows but no one has been, Alaska is a sensual dance-theater portrayal of memory. Choreographer Diana Szeinblum uses dark humor, extreme physicality, original music and a minimal set to create a beautiful spectacle that gravitates between uneasy stillness and violent frenzy.

Don’t miss it - Mon, Dec 5 at 7pm  BAM Rose Cinemas, (30 Lafayette Ave) $20; $18 for BAM members.

Here’s a teaser:

Popularity: 3% [?]

“I know this is going to sound just cheesy, but joy is something that is superproblematic.” So said choreographer John Jasperse, in Gia Kourlas’s Times feature from last weekend, of the ideas he wants to explore in Canyon, which opened last night at BAM as part of the Next Wave Festival (through Nov. 19; tickets $20). Based on the results, it’s hard to argue with his sentiment.

Canyon opens spectacularly. The scenography (by Tony Orrico, who spends the show rolling around inside a box and laying down tape on the floor) is mostly a matter of DayGlo neon tape–orange and yellow-green–which snakes throughout the entirety of the Harvey Theater, from the lobby and down the aisles to the stage itself, where it playfully coils and loops in geometrically strong lines around the patches of disrepair on the upstage wall that give the space its air of glamorous decrepitude. The effect is sort of like AutoCAD vomited its 3-d modeling all over the place, the clean grid lines breaking down and careening wildly, like a drunk driver in Tron. The stage itself is cleverly divided up by a big, white Marley that angles from down-left to up-right, where it curls up in a little two-foot-high ramp. The small orchestra providing the score is situated in the back corner up-left.

As mentioned, the opening is definitely the show’s highlight. The company of six dancers (including Jasperse) kick it off by running in from every direction only to halt and leap up into the air, or extend, or kick, before shifting direction and rushing off. Sometimes these are solos, sometimes duets, sometimes much more complicated group work elegantly timed to capture, through movement, the same careening energy as the audience sees in the design.

But after maybe 15 or 20 minutes, all the urgency, geometric play, misdirection, and, indeed, excitement, seems to drain out the piece as the tempo shifts from allegro to adagio. There’s nothing wrong with a shift like that–in fact, the result can be quite dramatic–and for quite some time after I found myself engrossed in what Jasperse was doing.

The dancers had planted some five golf flags down-right, forming a sort of circle or square, which the choreography came to fixate on. Individually, one dancer after another would stagger and stumble across the stage to this space, where a sort of epiphany seemed to happen, their movement shifting from staccato to legato, allowing for a long, elegant solo.

I have no idea what these moments were about, but I was impressed with Jasperse’s pacing and willingness to really engage almost studiously with these moments, to let us really take them in and experience them. But then, well, nothing really happened. Almost entropically, the sense of order and energy and purpose in the piece sort of falls apart. It got downright boring and even doze-inducing, and then, to my surprise, it just ended. At 70 minutes it falls solidly within the standard duration for an evening length dance, but it wound up feeling short by virtue of wanting it to finally go somewhere that, ultimately, it seems completely disinterested in going.

I honestly don’t know what to make of it. The title seems to suggest a sort of trek from the heights of the canyon walls down to the floor and the profundity of the empty expanse, but unless my natural geography is totally messed up, I thought a canyon had to have two walls, necessitating a climb back out. Whereas this piece feels a bit like a hiker who gets caught at the bottom and slowly dies of dehydration, staggering on more and more weakly till it can’t keep going and just gives up.

Popularity: 3% [?]

It’s been a busy week here at Culturebot! The season is in full swing and we wish we could clone ourselves to try and cover all the work that is gracing NYC’s stages! This week was a pretty eclectic group of shows starting with the raw, hallucinatory ramblings of D.J. Mendel and concluding with the sleek and sculptural “Connected” from Chunky Move.

Tuesday night took us to The Bushwick Starr for D.J. Mendel’s “Dick Done Broke”, directed by Dan Safer.  While waiting for curtain time I was talking to Sue Kessler and Noel Allain, ED and AD respectively of The Starr, about the show. Mendel first performed “Dick Done Broke” in 1999 and has had this notion of revisiting it for awhile – or perhaps revisiting it every ten years to see how he (and the piece) have changed. Noel and D.J. had been talking about working together and this came up, so they decided to do it. Noel was understandably thrilled about working with D.J. - Mendel is kind of a downtown legend, an iconic actor and reliable presence in Richard Foreman’s work and countless other productions, he brings a kind of sinister, threatening, serpentine but thoughtful and complicated masculinity to all of his roles. You kind of expect him to have a career like Paul Lazar or Eric Bogosian – original, quirky and unexpected downtown artists who carve out a career as character actors sans pareil in mainstream film. Time will tell!

“Dick Done Broke” is a slippy stream of consciousness ride through the mind of an extremely inebriated working class Joe, face-planted on the floor of a bar looking back wistfully at his youth, wrestling with his present and staring down a bleak future. The performance takes place on a platform (maybe 10×12?) suspended from the grid by aircraft cable that is swinging in perpetual motion, pendulum-like. It is above a field of empty liquor bottles. I’ll be honest – after a while it was kind of hard to watch, it alternately made me seasick and sleepy and I have no idea how Mendel managed to stay so incredibly focused while in constant motion. It definitely gave me the feeling of the kind of borderline-blackout wasted state of mind that the character was experiencing.

The writing is reminiscent of early Sam Shepard, memories flow seamlessly into philosophical musings into seeming nonsense, creating a vivid, hallucinatory effect. The character muses on his broken-ness, physically, mentally, emotionally. He has a certain amount  of self-awareness and a bruised psyche that wryly reflects on his condition without swerving into self-pity. Mendel delivers the monologue in a gruff but surprisingly nuanced torrent of words, pausing occasionally to let the imagery to sink in and then diving back into the narrative with force and passion. From time to time he stands up on the swaying platform, struggling to stay on his feet, simultaneously conveying his drunkenness and the precarious mental state of the character. At one point he even rolls over to take a piss off the back of the platform, which is both hilarious and pathetic. Towards the end of the show Mendel steps off the platform and steps around it, dodging it in motion, barely escaping collision. It is a very suspenseful, and funny, sequence that brings the show to a poignant yet elliptical confusion. Our hero will go on, he must go on, but it isn’t going to be easy or pretty and he’s not going to have any self-realizations that will change him as he stumbles into the future.

Jay Ryan’s lighting and Daniel Bernard Roumain’s sound score flesh out the actor’s presence nicely, creating a moody world of bars at closing time, of that horrible moment of drunken realization – “Oh My God! You’re All Ugly!” – exteriorizing (is that a word?) the inner state of the actor. Under Dan Safer’s direction all the pieces come together seamlessly. While I wouldn’t say “Dick Done Broke” is covering any particularly new territory story-wise or thematically, the collective talent of the collaborators and D.J. Mendel’s performance makes it a compelling, intriguing hour in the theater.

Wednesday night took us to BAM for Phantom Limb Company‘s “69 Degrees South” – a dream-like multimedia meditation on Shackleton’s journey to Antarctica. I first met Jessica Grindstaff (who, along with partner Erik Sanko are Phantom Limb) at The Tipping Point, a conference convened by the British Council, The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities to bring together artists and scientists to explore issues around climate change. I subsequently saw the re-staging of their breakthrough show The Fortune Teller at HERE and their collaboration with Ping Chong, The Devil You Know. Sanko’s puppets are really incredible, beautifully made and fascinating to watch. He’s also the founder and leader of the band Skeleton Key, a fixture in the downtown music scene in the mid/late 90′s and continuing through today with a heady sound of rock-based avant-noise sound texture songs. Grindstaff’s set design is imaginative and transporting.

“69 Degrees South” brings Sanko’s marionettes together with his Skeleton Key  project and adds collaboration with The Kronos Quartet, choreographer Andrea Miller, director Sophie Hunter, video by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty, costumes by fashion house threeASFOUR and a host of other top-notch artists and designers to create a multimedia dreamscape that is visually stunning and sonically multi-textured.

Narratively the show is a little bit lacking, and those expecting to learn actual facts about the Shackleton Expedition will be disappointed. (For that, I would recommend the film Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, which I saw at the Imax theater at the Baltimore Science Center. It’s probably okay on a TV but was awesome in Imax!) For instance – it is kind of hard to tell from the show that all of Shackleton’s men survived – which was a miracle – instead the returning presence of a death skeleton puppet gives the impression that they are lost.

“69 Degrees South” probably works best if you imagine it as a kind of immersive, non-linear, music video-type experience. The sound – both live and pre-recorded – is really great, it moves seamlessly from Skeleton Key to Kronos Quartet, the live mix is complicated and multi-dimensional, you’re constantly asking yourself  ”Where is that sound coming from?” and “Is it live or recorded?” The video is massive – frequently covering the whole stage – and, thankfully, is deeply integrated into the overall aesthetic. Grindstaff’s set design, that includes three towering icebergs, is clean, cool and stylish, well-complemented by the lighting design. And the actor/puppeteers do a great job in their various roles.

If anything the performers and puppets are underutilized. The music, video and staging kind of overwhelm what could have been a very central, humanizing, component. As a result the project overall feels somewhat distanced and abstract. The marionettes don’t do much more than walk around, I found myself wishing that they were doing more. Having seen what Phantom Limb has done previously, I was hoping that the marionettes would play a more pivotal role in this show. There were a few moments that suggested the humor and depth that could have been more richly explored, including an interlude between a seal puppet and Shackleton.

Also, if I didn’t know that Phantom Limb had actually gone to Antarctica for research and to do field recordings (that were incorporated into the soundtrack) I probably wouldn’t have been aware of that dramaturgical element.

Overall I found the show to be beautiful, meditative and mostly enjoyable. There were some stretches where my attention wandered a bit and I would have liked to have seen more use of the marionettes, but I definitely applaud the ambition and scope of the project and appreciated the seamless mix of disciplines and media.

Thursday night took me to The Kitchen for Maria Hassabi’s SHOW. This piece harkens back to her 2007 piece Gloria at PS122. Once again she is collaborating on a duet with Hristoula Harakas, once again she is exploring a series of posed situations and glacial choreographies. In this latest iteration she has changed the context, bisecting the space of the Kitchen to half, removing the seats and creating a more gallery/”happening” type environment. The audience enters the space and waits a good ten minutes before anything happens. In the empty space with a bunch of lights on the floor in one half of the room, we endure the now all-too-familiar experience of being abandoned to our own devices. People chat amongst themselves and then start to look around the room expectantly. Then everyone quiets down, waiting. And nothing happens, and everyone starts looking around again, and you can almost hear everyone thinking the same thing, “Is this the show? Are they really going to leave us here on our own for an hour? I mean, it is called “Show”? Maybe she’s making a statement about show?” And just when you think you’re totally fucked, Maria and Hristoula enter and strike a pose in the middle of the crowd.

Over the course of the next 70 minutes or so, they move through a sequence of postures and movements, alternately staring fiercely into each other’s eyes or deeply into the audience, face to face. The first sequence, which was basically a duet, a glacial descent to the ground, was riveting. The dancers created tension in and between their bodies, inciting an air of expectancy. We watched as they slowly descended, muscles taut, legs and torso extended, subtly twitching under the strain, in deep concentration.

From there the piece moved on to explore the same basic idea, in different variations. For me the most compelling parts were when the two were in (silent) dialogue with each other. They really have a deep rapport, and they’re both intense performers. When they were moving closely together, either in mirror or variation, there was a tension and subconscious communication that you could almost tap into. When they moved apart and to different areas of the space, that tension and connection seemed to wane, it was harder to maintain focus and my attention wandered. My experience of the work was alternately fascination and boredom. I appreciate the demands on my attention, the way I was being asked to focus on the minutiae of motion, the subtleties of interaction and the feeling of tension and expectation. But over the course of the hour I also felt fatigued and frustrated, waiting for something more to happen.

The sound design was very atmospheric – it sounded like it was just a recording of a crowd of people in a lobby waiting for a show to start. For a moment I thought that was what it was – that they had recorded us in the lobby of the Kitchen prior to the show and were playing our own ambient noise back to us, which would have added an interesting meta-layer to the experience. But I don’t think that was the case.

UPDATE: THIS WAS IN FACT THE CASE. SOUND DESIGN WAS LOBBY NOISE RE-MIXED. Matthew Lyons from The Kitchen says:

Alex Waterman, the sound designer, takes a recording of the first few minutes of the piece when the audience enters the space.  That gets played back into the house and he re-records that playback with the room sound.  And then that gets played back into the house and re-recorded, over and over till the end of the piece.  So the original few minutes of the start of the piece gets muddier and muddier with the new sounds on top of each playback.

Very cool!

I really loved Joe Levasseur’s lighting – it was incredibly  bright and clean it almost seemed hyper-real, as if it added a dimension of extra clarity to my vision. As I looked at the dancers and, when my attention wandered, at my fellow audience members, it was as if I could see every hair on someone’s head, every line on their face, every subtle flex or twitch of a muscle. I don’t know if it is possible to create increased visual clarity through lighting design, but it sure seemed like it. The only element I kind of disagreed with was the ending. I’m not going to say what it was – I don’t want to give it away – but it is actually a pretty familiar and obvious thing and I was surprised that she used it. I mean, it makes sense, but it sort of undercut the previous hour’s worth of experience.

I like Maria’s work. While her choreography is pretty out there, she definitely pushes the body into interesting and unexpected directions. She asks compelling questions about the meaning of the observed body and about the dynamic and expectations between audience and performer. That doesn’t mean I always love the experience of the work – like I said, I alternated between fascination and boredom. But it is well worth checking out.

Friday night I went to the Joyce to check out “Connected” by Chunky Move at The Joyce. I’ve really enjoyed Chunky Move since I first saw Tense Dave at DTW back in 2005. Their subsequent work that has been shown in NYC has always been forward-thinking and compelling, so I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. Especially because this is the last piece created for the company by founding artistic director Gideon Obarzanek, who will be leaving at the end of this year to be replaced by Anouk Van Dijk.

“Connected” is an interesting piece. Where Glow, at The Kitchen in 2008 involved direct interface between a dancer and digital technology, “Connected” places dancers in juxtaposition with a kinetic sculpture created by California-based artist Reuben Margolin. At the beginning of the piece there is a duet on stage right as other ensemble members complete the construction of the sculpture/machine on stage left. Once it is complete it begins to undulate, lift and transform – manipulated by strings attached to wheel and operated by the dancers. Eventually the dancers remove the string and the sculpture is operated by the movement of the wheel on its own.

As always, the choreography is both complex and clean. The dancers make it look simple and easy, but as you look deeply at their movements, you find yourself discovering all kinds of nuance and subtlety, as they weave together elaborate movement sequences into one unbroken chain. They’re beautiful dancers and bring presence and muscularity to the choreography. As they work in concert with the sculpture/machine you start to meditate on the meaning of “hand made” – the role of human imagination and technical dexterity on the manipulation of the natural world. Since the sculpture moves in wave-like, undulatory patterns, it almost looks like a physical manifestation of a digital rendering of some architectural structure. Knowing that it is wood and string creates a sense of wonder and mystery. And the ending tableau was really striking.

The lighting was clean, simple and elegant, matched by a similarly environmental sound score. The overall effect was of a well-integrated work of art, where sculpture, movement, technology and mechanics came together in one extraordinary living aesthetic machine.

Mostly I found myself fascinated and delighted by the interplay of the dancers with each other and with the sculpture. Sometimes it was hard to focus on one specific thing and I found my mind wandering. That could be as much a result of show-going fatigue as anything else, though.

It is playing tonight and tomorrow. Check it out if you can.

Popularity: 10% [?]

An animation still from "Brooklyn Babylon," by artist Danijel Zezelj

Usually doing a preview is tricky business, because–absent an interview–what you’re doing is writing about something you haven’t seen, made by artists you may or may not know much about, with the only information at your disposal the biased press release materials you’ve gotten, some only reviews and interviews, and grainy YouTube clips. But for the upcoming pair of offerings at BAM’s Next Wave Fest (which is picking up steam), a pair of my online colleagues have some great things worth checking out.

First, Phantom Limb. 69°S, which opens Wednesday (seating is limited; call the box-office), is one of the shows that has a lot of buzz, because the puppetry is, well, amazing. Seriously–check out the photos. But what’s more, Erik Sanko and Jessica Grindstaff, the husband-and-wife team behind the company, are well-known artists who’ve left their mark on people in the past, and Rob Weinert-Kendt has a lovely post over at the Wicked Stage recounting his own past interviewing the duo.

Phantom Limb. Photo by Sarah Walker.

“My wife to this day rolls her eyes a bit when I start to go on about the magical ‘puppet people’ and that text-less globe,” he writes. (You’ll have to read the piece to understand the part about the globe.) The occasion for the post is his interview with the pair in Time Out, which you can read here.

Second, and a bit more touching, is Parabasis’s Isaac Butler on Brooklyn Babylon (tickets here), which opens next week. A collaboration between artist Daniejl Zezelj and musician Darcy James Argue, the show is a live-art-meets-video-art performance by the artist supported by Argue’s steampunk jazz-band Secret Society. Not only does it sound cool, but for Butler, who was a “directorial consultant” on the piece, it marks completing a childhood dream.

It is also the culmination of a dream I’ve had since I was in college, to be involved in a directorial capactiy on a show that performs in Next Wave. I’ve had a romantic association with the Brooklyn Academy of Music ever since I was a little kid, when my freaky grandparents gave me Philip Glass cassettes and took me to see The Hard Nut and Twyla Tharp and told me over and over again of this world in New York City. A world where these curious, unclassifiable works of performance happened. A world at that time dominated in their minds by The Kitchen and BAM. As I grew up and got into Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson and all sorts of other performing artists of that period, I realized that all of them connected at some point to BAM.

It became– privately– my brass ring. I never talked about it. In fact, this is the first time I’m disclosing it to anyone, but having a show at BAM has been my idea of what success would mean ever since I was a sophomore in college.

Anyway, both shows look visually fantastic and feature collaborations with great musicians (69°S was developed with Kronos Quartet and features live music from Skeleton Key), so check them out, and read both Rob’s and Isaac’s previews of them: when people like that have such a personal interest in the work, it’s wise to take note.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Karina Smulders and Chris Nietvelt in "Cries and Whispers." Photo by Jan Versweyveld.

I don’t entirely want to slag down the programming at BAM’s Next Wave Fest thus far, but I wasn’t just excited or interested in the shows this week, I needed them. The theater programming has had its moments, SABAB’s Speaker’s Progress a good play hampered by surtitles, and Robert Wilson’s Threepenny Opera, being little more than an exercise in style, was at least fun and cool to look at. But the dance? Ranging from inexplicable (Compagnie Thor) to predictable (Cloud Gate) to promising but a bit disappointing (Beijing Dance Theater), it left something to be desired.

But this week, the festival came out guns blazing with a pair of fantastic pieces from Belgian director Ivo van Hove and choreographer William Forsythe.

As much as I liked William Forsythe’s I don’t believe in outer space (through Oct. 29), there was a small part of me that couldn’t help but smirk at the thought, as I watched it, that it was a giant ego trip. This is a work he’s drescribed as “A look at my life without me” that takes as its leitmotif the lyrics to “I Will Survive” (hence the title, from the lines “And now you’re back/from outer space”), which the company speak throughout.

But of course, even if it is (and there are certainly more subtle interpretations), Forsythe is the sort of artist one can forgive for ego. This was my first time seeing his work onstage, and it did not disappoint.

Much of the credit goes to Dana Casperson. I don’t really know what I expected her to be like, but a short, spunky, irrepressible ball of energy that acted as well as she danced was not it. I’d read about her opening scene performance, in which she performs a dialogue (with herself) alternating between a mousy housewife with an unexpected, almost demonic, guest, but it still wowed me. And the way she moves is incredible. I mean, all of the dancers were great, but she still stood out.

David Kern, Esther Balfe, and Ander Zabala in I don’t believe in outer space (photo by Dominik Mentzos)

The movement was compelling, both fluid and harshly abbreviated all at once. Extensions never fully extended, but would shift into a turn that would twist out into a step, creating a sense of constant flux and movements that disorientingly never quite seem to finish what they’re doing. It was, in a way, vaguely reminiscent of some of the work from Ralph Lemon’s How Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere last year on the same stage.

Ultimately, the piece revolves around absence. The space metaphor is apt: it’s as if the dancers, the dialogue, the set pieces (mainly small round-ish foam lumps that start out in a somewhat linear pattern and are kicked and thrown about over the course of the show) are all astronomical objects that have suddenly found themselves adrift in space, spiraling chaotically outwards once the mass they orbited disappears.

I watched, thoroughly entertained if never particularly emotionally engaged with the work. Which, yes, one might see as a negative, rendering the work little more than highbrow entertainment. But even so, it’s smart and compelling. My only slight disappointment, personally, was that it didn’t capture me quite the same way Pina Bausch’s Vollmond did last year, where I spent the two-plus hour performance enraptured. And I don’t think it’s because Bausch’s work was more emotionally captivating. Perhaps today, Forsythe’s style and approach is so ingrained in dance that it loses some of the thrill, or perhaps his approach is just more cerebral.

Ivo van Hove’s Cries and Whispers (through Oct. 29) is oddly bifurcated by a long sequence that occurs only about a third of the way through. A stage adaptation and reimagining of Ingmar Bergman’s film, the first part follows the last agonizing day in the life of a dying woman, while the second and latter part explores the unhappy, unfulfilling lives of her sisters. The reason this scene splits the piece is because it so starkly contrasts with the rest, which is laden with video-based polyvalence, industrialized score, Yves Klein-style buckets of blue paint thrown across the stage and mixed with diarrheic feces, as the story veers hallucinatorially through life and death, past and present and future.

But compared to all that business, the bifurcating scene is a study in simplicity and silence. For some twelve long minutes, three women and two men clean up the aftermath of a prolonged death and prepare for the funeral. They wash the body, launder the soiled sheets, carefully fold the laundry, shroud the corpse, and all in silence. It’s a beautiful study of quotidian domesticity, stripped of the aesthetic tricks employed through the rest of the piece, recalling the beautiful sequence from Vittorio di Sica’s 1952 film Umberto D., that follows a working class woman’s morning routine. (Consequently, Bergman, I’ve learned, cited this movie as his favorite.) In short, watching it, I saw it as a beautiful cinematic trick, by which van Hove translated a filmic effect to the stage.

So I was surprised when, the day after the show, I read in Gothamist’s informative interview with van Hove that this scene was, in fact, his biggest contribution to Bergman’s original vision (I have not seen the film). But upon reflection (and I did a lot of that; I actually left the theater a little disappointed by the show and only the next day found myself deeply engaged with it), I realized that it makes perfect sense: the scene is central to the metaphorical language van Hove develops within the work. If death necessarily makes us reflect on what constitutes a “good life,” then the very concreteness of these images can be repurposed throughout when comparing the unhappiness of the sisters’ experience to the more fulfilling one of their departed sibling.

Bergman’s film was set on an estate in the late 19th Century. The dying woman, Agnes, who never married, is attended by an older maid and caregiver, Anna, and her married sisters Karin and Maria. Van Hove has translated the story into the present, and built the piece conceptually around an idea he discovered examining Bergman’s source material. There was no script drafted for the film. Rather, Bergman wrote a 40-some page prose work that the actors worked off of, which contained the nugget, largely absent from the movie, that Agnes is an artist. Van Hove makes this the focus: his Agnes (Chris Nietvelt) is a painter and video artist who continues working even as she declines.

The set (by Jan Versweyveld) is a deconstruction of Agnes’s apartment. A huge house-shaped frame, suspended above the stage, is lowered onto it at the end, creating a visual image of how the show explores small lives and intimate domestic details. As the work opens,  Agnes is sleeping on a hospital bed, maintained by modern medical equipment, with one of her video cameras trained on her with a live feed to a projection upstage, offering a detailed view of her anguished sleep. As her sisters drowse and Anna (Karina Smulders), re-envisioned as a younger nurse (and possibly Sapphic love interest) does yoga downstage, Agnes wakes, rises, and relieves herself in a medical waste bucket before collapsing in anguish.

In quick succession we see her go through her last agonizing hours and die. The bulk of show comes after the silent interregnum, as we follow Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Halina Reijn) through their unhappy lives. Maria is seemingly immature, unhappily married and carrying on an affair with Agnes’s doctor. In one scene, child-like, she throws herself at Karin as though seeking support and sisterly love, only to rebuffed by her emotionally closed-off sister. Karin, for her part, is unhappily married to a cold and rather ass-hole-y guy. She’s shut down as a matter of mental and emotional protection–Maria’s loving embraces almost seem to cause her physical pain, while physical pain (in one horrendous moment, she appears to all but circumcise herself with broken glass, blood running freely down the insides of her legs) serves as a release for her.

Much of piece is hallucinatory and dream-like, easing smoothly into a phantasmagoria in which both sisters encounter and draw their boundaries with Agnes’s ghostly presence. And the piece ends, house having descended on the setting, with a monologue from the now dead Agnes. Agnes, in her own telling, never really “lived” like her sisters did, because she gave herself over to her art. But her sisters’ lives bear painful resemblance to a prolonged version of her own death, asking provocative questions over how to define a life lived fully.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Lyndsey Karr. Photo by Ian Douglas.

Beijing Dance Theater, Haze (BAM Next Wave Fest). Due to a scheduling conflict, I didn’t get a chance to see Wang Yuanyuan’s choreography until closing night on Saturday, and ultimately, it was a mixed bag that left me ambivalent in a somewhat similar fashion to Cloud Gate the week before. While BDT‘s production was more contemporary in terms of the visuals, it remained wedded to the traditions of Chinese classical dance, as my guest–a Shanghai-born and Chinese trained choreographer now based in New York–pointed out. Which she found disappointing if about as expected.

The work is intensely physical and lovely, albeit in a fairly predictable fashion. The company is extremely fit and accomplished (I got a disquisition on the demands facing Chinese dancers trying to enter the academies, and all I can say is damn), but the application falls along decidedly more traditional lines. Claudia La Rocco in the Times even went so far as to compare it to the activist dance of the Thirties, and she has a point. Here, the dancers move through a fog-filled space heavy on the dark atmospherics. Their movement traces personal struggle and disorientation that’s inspired by the huge challenges facing China in the recent past: ecological destruction, earthquakes, a rocky global economy, the fluidity of their technique interrupted by frequent falls on the bouncy, foam covered stage, which made them a bit too fluid for the effect.

But not only does this leave the dance feeling more than a bit literal, it also points to the limitations of Chinese contemporary dance. And hence my ambivalence. It’s a very Western idea, I think, that informs most expectations of contemporary dance that I’m reluctant to foist on a different dance culture. At its heart, contemporary work is anti-tradition and seeks its own unique expressive vocabulary. New York-based artists tend to be more conceptual, while technique-based approaches dominate elsewhere (Europe, Israel), but there’s always a tension in the work between creating new movement paradigms and tearing them down. Deconstruction of received forms is almost a generational movement in the field. In China, this hasn’t exactly happened yet (if Wang is any indication, which admittedly she may not be, though my guest was certainly of that opinion, as well).

On the other hand, compared to Cloud Gate, which revelled in East Asian kitsch for its materials, BDT was at least adventurous in terms of concept and content, which I imagine is an important step. Seeing dance as a vehicle for examining contemporary realities and experience firmly places the form in the midst of a larger cultural dialogue, and the next generation of choreographers may diverge radically from it in terms of form, even as they take advantage of the space companies like BDT carved out for them to work.

Lyndsey Karr, The One (Chocolate Factory). I had little idea what to expect from Karr’s piece going in, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I got. Raw, visceral, and remarkably engaging, I left thinking, “This is the kind of piece that makes kids go into live art (for better or for worse).” There was nudity, satires of female character tropes, things were removed from vaginas, cake was served. It was a big mess of ideas and images that did mostly came together in the end.

Entering the main performance space at the Chocolate Factory for the first act of the show, you found the space transformed into a big white room. The seating, two long single rows of seats facing one another, raked across the space in a diagonal line, forming an aisle in the center. At one end, a large satiny white bag sat with tulle poofing out the top and strings extending to the ceiling as though it were a puppet. Along the walls hung white plaster body casts of women, recalling George Segal’s sculptures. The piece opens slowly as Karr and collaborator Gina Kohler, nude at the outset, begin slow movement sequences behind the audience rows, so that the sightlines were obscured. Eventually the two made it to one end of the aisle, and then the performance really kicked off.

A tortured study of motherhood and love of various sorts, the centerpiece of the first act was a long, tortured crawl down the aisle, which was wonderfully expressive and a study in contrasts. Karr is a decidely skinny woman, while Kohler is more voluptuous, and the movement expressed different things on their respective bodies. As they finished this sequence, the bag rose on its wires, spilling out a collection of white-washed baby-dolls from which the duo retrieved two large rocks painted blood red. To these, the two tied golden cords and then slowly made their way back down the aisle again, unspooling the cord from their vaginas so that it stretched out like umbillical cords tying them to the burdensome, bloody rocks.

Not too much to mistake in that image.

The other acts offered different takes on female experience. Act 2, set in the basement as a sort of cabaret, with seating at small tables, turned on the wife/whore conceit. It begins with the pair appearing in matching platinum blonde wigs and nude-toned body stockings that served to obscure their individuality and turn them into objects. Needless to say, they were also in high heels and performed a sort of burlesque routine. Then made nude again, the pair donned skimpy aprons a la French maid constumes and proceeded to harriedly try to heat and serve each audience member a piece of pie.

The final image occurred in the main hallway as the audience was exiting. Inside the front the doors, the pair stood, naked, sort of bopping or dancing in place to the music while coiling and uncoiling the golden cords around their fingers. It was oddly the most enigmatic and striking image in the entire show, and never progressed beyond that. I wasn’t sure what to make of it as I left, but it certainly capped the piece.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Oct. 16-29, BAM plays host to the Forsythe Company as part of the 2011 Next Wave Festival (tickets $20+), which will be presenting I don’t believe in outer space. Developed following the iconic choreographer’s sixtieth birthday, the piece is, as he told the Guardian when it played Sadler’s Wells earlier this year, an exploration of his own mortality, “It’s the theatre of disappearance. An absurd memoir. A look at my life without me.” Informed by the phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, it presents the stuff of Forsythe’s own experience as a collection of debris, detritus stripped (or possibly not) of meaning absent his own perspective. By all accounts it’s a powerful work, and one which won praise across the board for the performance of Dana Caspersen, a long-time collaborator from his Ballet Frankfurt days (and his wife).

Popularity: 3% [?]

Photo by Li Huimin

From October 19-22, BAM will be presenting Beijing Dance Theater‘s Haze as part of the 2011 Next Wave Festival (tickets $30). Perhaps the most prominent contemporary dance company in China, BDT is helmed by choreographer Wang Yuanyuan, perhaps best known to broad American audiences for choreographing the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. In Haze, Wang explores the complex and challenging nature of life in contemporary China, touching on the uncertainty affecting the global economy as well as the trauma following the devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province in 2008. We interviewed Ms. Wang via email.

I’m curious about the role of contemporary dance in today’s China. Who are your audiences and what is their attraction to the form? What are their expectations?

Contemporary dance is still not a mainstream art form in China currently: both the number of artists and audiences are very small. Most general Chinese audiences are still accustomed to seeing the result immediately or expect the artist to give answers somehow, yet this goes counter to the feature and essence of contemporary dance which requires the imaginations of the audience. Thus it is not easy in China.

The current audience of contemporary dance in China is mainly young or middle-aged people who have received higher education or with Western education background. Like all the other contemporary dance audiences in the world, they do expect the emotional shocks coming from the performance and the sympathetic response to the social reality and people’s spiritual outlook. But the number of this kind of audience is really small.

In the past, I know you’ve done a fair bit of state sponsored work, most notably the amazing opening ceremonies to the Olympic games. What kind of state support do the arts get? Are the arts seen as an important part of the larger economic and social development?

Firstly, I don’t think my creation for the Olympics opening ceremony is comparative with that I’m doing with our company. It’s no doubt that arts are playing more and more important roles in presenting the national image of China, but mostly they prefer large event and it’s different from the development of contemporary dance. There are many kinds of way for the government to support arts, but most resource are occupied by national-owned companies. Beijing Dance Theater is an independent company, normally we can apply for subsidy for new creation and some important international tour. Yes, as the government are paying more and more attentions on the cultural industry, arts should demonstrate larger and larger capacity in vitalizing the economy and social development.

Choreographer Wang Yuanyuan (photo by Han Jiang)

I understand your background is in classical ballet, which you pursued from an early age. What led you to expand into contemporary forms?

No, actually firstly my background is Chinese classical dance instead of ballet, then I turned to study choreography of contemporary dance. This was sometimes misunderstood by people because I had been working as contemporary choreographer at National Ballet of China since 1995. Of course, both the Chinese classical dance education of my early age and the contemporary dance education later have given me rich resources of body language, as well as great curious to experience the magic of body movement. Chinese dance pays attention on the dancers’ upper-body movement and inner emotion, while classical ballet focus more on the feet. Contemporary dance as a totally new mentality is the way that I’m thinking, and I express with the language that I grasped from Chinese dance and ballet.

In the past, you’ve worked with Chinese classics as base texts for your work–I’m thinking of something like Golden Lotus, for instance. Does Haze have similar influences, or is it a more direct and immediate response to the past few years?

I don’t think there is any influence of Chinese classics in Haze, which was created in 2009, inspired from the living reality in China and the mental uncertainty about future.  People are trying to find an exit in nowhere, to find the direction of heart.

If I understand correctly, Haze explores the human experience of the environmental and economic turmoil in China over the past couple years, as the nation struggles with the legacy of development and the effects of the global economic crisis. What kind of sense do people have of their ability to make positive changes to improve such conditions in China? What’s the social vibe?

Perhaps everybody will have quite different reaction, I have heard many kinds of understandings. It’s fine and, I feel, very interesting. It’s exciting that one piece will bring so many imaginations and understandings to the audience. Let’s explain a little about my inspirations.

The idea of Haze comes from the hesitation mentality of many contemporary Chinese.

It was started in May 12, 2009 when the large earthquake attached Sichuan province, China. The first part of the piece is “Light”. At that time, I watched a lot of videos and listened to a lot of descriptions, no matter hope or life, the first impression for the survivors is always light. Thus light is the first feeling of life and the hope of life. In dark we need light, we need the direction.

If “Light” is just a point, then the second part “City” is a network. Living in this world, in the city, you have to interact with all kinds of people and things. The network is your relations with them, and is also the surface you are daily walking on. To leave or to stay, to go forward or backward, you are always walking on this network. In Chinese, the pronunciation of “network” is the same with that of “maze”. In this complicated network, maze is always. That’s our portrait in the urban city, true to life.

And the third part is “Shore”. The city is sometimes like a lake, or as large as an ocean. Everybody is struggling and floating in it. Where is the real shore? The shore is the metaphor of the choices in our life, the numerous choices. Every choice occupies your time and space in your life, you cannot predict whether it is correct or not. In the fast changing world, before we give ourselves a conclusion, everything changes again.

I watched some video of the piece and was struck by how aggressively physical the movement is, with the dancers throwing themselves and falling hard on the padded floors. Where did that particular concept come from and what challenges did it present in terms of choreographing it?

On the stage, the whole dance floor is replaced by a large sponge with hard ground framed as the shore. This sponge enabled me a lot of unprecedented possibility.  During the creation, firstly I just wanted to use a smaller piece as a part of the stage. But when I stood on it, the unprecedented feeling of out of balance attracted me a lot. As the dancers are ever trained to find the balance in dance, they made great efforts to get familiar with it, during which I found many interesting movements. When we enlarge the area of the sponge, the fear disappeared stepwise. Thus, the mental and physical feelings are enabled to be identical at the same time. The physical condition becomes totally same with the mental condition that I want to express–this was a great discovery.

Actually, our pains mostly come from the fear–fear to fall down, fear to be hurt, fear to give the price, etc. But when our body get used to the sponge, when we get used to this feeling, we can find the balance and gain our confident and the sense of safety again. Further, we may even enjoy the feeling of falling down. We embraced the pain, accepted the fear, and to live with them together. In this moment, we win the true peace in our hearts.

You trained in the United States, where you went tp college. What impact did that have on your work and your approach? I often find that artists who train in two different cultural atmospheres find themselves navigating the two, with each background informing the artist’s understanding of the other. Has that been the case?

I think so. Sometimes when you jump out of the environment that you were familiar with and retrospect, you understand it better. When the two cultures infiltrate into each other, they combine and generate a new support.

In the past ten years, I’ve been always think and create with the combined support of the two cultures, or maybe, to me, they are not two cultures but a totally new way of expression. The Oriental culture may be my blood, and the Western culture is my body. In Golden Lotus, I am interpreting a Chinese classical novel in my personal way and with my personal experience.

What are your next projects going to be? What’s next for you as an artist?

The next project is also something about the personal response to the social reality. Currently my inspirations on the next project originated from the well-known Chinese writer Mr. Lu Xun‘s articles. The economy developed very fast in the contemporary China, yet there is great deficiency in people’s mind. This is quite similar with the China that Lu Xun described 100 years ago. Now I would like to shout with my dance on the stage as Mr Lu Xun was shouted with his words.

As a Chinese artist, as the artistic director of Beijing Dance Theater, I hope I could continue creating my piece freely, and I hope our company is able to survive. We hope more audience will come to the stage and understanding what we are thinking and presenting.

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