A queer feminist anthropologist exploring the realities of culture, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Asia
San Francisco Ballet returned to the stage of Beijing’s NCPA this October, during the company’s second visit to China, with Helgi Tomasson’s Giselle. Dancing Giselle was Tan Yuan Yuan, a Shanghainese ballerina who has now been performing with San Francisco Ballet for 20 years. Her return to the Chinese stage brought enthusiastic Beijingers out in hordes on [...]
Life in Progress A lone dancer skuttles onto stage dragging an arm, resting momentarily where a bare tree stands centre stage. Guillem moves like a whirring gizmo, compact and full of electricity, as though she could burst any moment. Her livewire limbs rarely come to rest for long. One quiet moment finds her face down, spread-eagle [...]
Divine Comedy Trilogy: Inferno, Cantica, Paradiso A ring of brightly lit bodies hangs suspended above the stage of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). A lone dancer writhes and wriggles his way across the circle in which he is encased, launching off one body, spinning in mid-air and landing securely with a soft [...]
In their Spring Equinox programme, the LDTX dancers presented an array of creative and innovative new choreographies. On the last Saturday of March, a huge crowd squeezed into the LDTX studio in Southeast Beijing to watch eight of the fourteen works created by the LDTX dancers. The company founder, Willy Tsao, welcomed everyone warmly (in both [...]
The beauty of it will enthrall young and old, but the subtleties of this story appeal best to adults.
A distilled movement reveals itself: these are citizens throwing petrol bombs toward a distant enemy.
A morning at Beijing Dance / LDTX Studios It’s the first rainy day since my arrival in Beijing. I am met, somewhat sodden, at Dawanglu station by a young Chinese woman named Jade. Clutching our umbrellas, exchange our thoughts about London, the city we’ve both left recently, and Beijing, where we’re both newly living. Jade [...]
Hofesh Shechter Company's In Good Company It’s not often that dancers are given free reign to create new works of their own, and even rarer that they get all the support necessary to make fully-realised, successful pieces. That’s why In Good Company, the project enabling dancers of the Hofesh Shechter Company to present their own [...]
Weighty, abstract and astounding: Tao Dance Theatre’s 4 and 5 Hypnotic, enthralling and undeniably special: bodies ebb and flow with the tide of change in Chinese choreographer Tao Ye’s 4 and 5. These are just two parts in a series of abstract works that “explore the potential of the human body as a visual element, [...]
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's challenging Vortex Temporum Dancers whirl through dark space, crossing paths, each following their own axes as they run at full speed along pre-drawn lines like ebullient planets. A deconstruction of the relationship between dance and music, Vortex Temporum is an engaging work, both powerfully engaging and lightly playful. This week saw [...]
