The Pink. - La MaMa E.T.C., New York, New York - dance reviews

Dance Magazine, Dec, 1994 by Molly McQuade

Muna Tseng La Mama E.T.C. September 22-October 2,1994 Reviewed by Molly McQuade

Muna Tseng, born in Hong Kong, raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, and since 1978 a presence in New York City, glanced back to the sixteenth-century Chinese novel The Golden Lotus as a source for her new piece, The Pink, created in collaboration with Bessie Award-winning Chinese composer Tan Dun and first performed last May in Hong Kong. But there was no need to have read the novel in order to meander through the dawns and opacities of the evening-length dance.

Though implying bits of story involving erotic reverie, conflict, and misery, The Pink was not narrative, really, but poetic at a relaxed pace. And while the dance at first appeared to depend on imagery for its authority, the imagery was consistently fragile and transitory enough to raise interesting questions about the general possibilities of dance--of any dance, but especially Tseng's.

The questions? For instance, what can we see, and how should we try to see it, as a scene from a dance ripples to an end? We can't grasp a dance, or its imagery; each passes too quickly. So maybe dance is better looked through, rather than at, as a metaphor for experience. Maybe it's best glimpsed indirectly, as if through the screen of a partially transparent or even rumpled sheet of paper.

The fourteen dancers were much preoccupied with paper; they intermittently wrapped and unwrapped long white pieces of it around their gestures, their momentary frissons, their bodies. They borrowed paper to blow on, releasing penetrating squeaks. They lolled on long pathways of it like shy odalisques. Paper shielded them from our direct gaze (as did the dancers' papery, more-ethereal-than-usual costumes). But ultimately the guard of paper gave way: the dancers ripped, tossed, and squeezed it with an exuberant fury before disrobing ceremonially and making a remarkably peaceful exit.

Meditative imagery shared space in The Pink with sexual sporting and a few spare, wry jokes; a climactic scene in this mostly nonclimactic dance involved the apparent rape of a woman dancing atop very tall stilts. And the drumming, howls, and more melodious vocals of Dun's music evoked a highly changeable imagery of their own. But despite the long ceremonial shedding of movement and sound, the craft of the dance seemed wanting, as if art had been absorbed by time in a ritual never specified, never named.