National. - Peter Pan - Hamlet - Dance Salad - Strange Humors - Rhythm Is Our Voice - Night of a Dancer - 180 degrees - dance review

Dance Magazine, July, 2002

Among the highlights was an appearance by the Chinese company Guangdong, whose director, the incomparable Xing Liang, had stunned Houston audiences two years earlier with his Asian Dance Salad performance. Xing sent two of his pieces: 180 degrees and The Night of a Dancer. The former began in silence as four women in white silk slips moved so fluidly about the stage you hardly noticed when the plaintive strains of a Bach piece, played live by Yo-Yo Ma, began. The women used oversized folding fans to hide, then reveal, their faces in a moving work for and about women. The Night of a Dancer had Wang Tao writhing on his sleeping mat to Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. In a somnambulistic state, Tao began to sleep-dance. His jerks become patterns, his movements barre practices. It was clever and charming and a lovely showcase for Wang's lithe body and expressive humor.

The company brought five pieces in all, including Sang Jijia's Heart, Shape, Substance/Comrades, a duet for Wang and Zhao Liang. Set to music by John Adams, this was an athletic yet emotional dance for two men that may be about worker angst or love relations; either way, it was powerful and touching.

Meredith Monk supplied an eerie score with shrieks for Yunna Long's Do You Be, based on a Chinese legend of a lost ghost. Zhao Liang, dancing the wrenching solo, provided an adequate substitute for the missing co-director, who usually dances it; he has similar suppleness and strength.

Guangdong combines an Asian sense of tradition and history with American modern movements to create unique work. Wu Bing designed wonderful costumes, from semi-traditional to fanciful, while the lighting was minimal, sets almost nonexistent, and most of the music American. The exception was Long's Linglei/Unusual. Done to a Chinese synthesized score, this highly formal ensemble work closed two of the three nights of Dance Salad. Drawn from Chinese folklore of animals, the piece combines a corps of shiny creatures--a flock, a school, a herd?--in fast-moving patterns with a slow-motion couple in white dresses. Breathtaking in its visuals, moving in its steps, it was a perfect finale.

But there was much more than just Guangdong, although an evening with just them might have been enough. There were more ensemble pieces this time. Besides the Guangdong works, Alonzo King's LINES Ballet of San Francisco fielded two company works: Tarab and The Heart's Natural Inclination. Both featured King's beautiful, strong dancers (Chiharu Shibata worthy of individual note) in inventive, balletic choreography.

The Goteborg Ballet of Gothenburg, Sweden, also brought a larger work. Jacopo Godani's Digital Secrets set four dancers to the pounding rhythm of the digital age, including Rei Watanabe who, on two consecutive evenings, morphed into a pre-teen Juliet in the balcony scene from Martino Muller's excellent update of Romeo and Juliet. In her version of baby-doll jammies, Watanabe invoked the blush of a first kiss with Mattias Suneson. The duet was so gorgeous and so simple, it's a pity the completed ballet hasn't been seen here. Goteborg also offered a humorous William Forsythe pas in Herman Schmerman.