Rice and Tree: Two Dances

The dance performance Rice by the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan at BAM Gilman Opera House was very exciting.  It far surpassed my expectations.  So far I saw the company twice before this one: Wild Cursive and Water Stains on the Wall, and I heard Lin Hwai-min, the choreographer, twice in a pre-performance talk, the first time with Anne Kisselgoff interviewing him.  We saw in Rice the same varied body movements that are uniquely his and the highly sophisticated ensemble dancing, complex and yet never confusing.  In addition, the cycle of the rice cultivation through the changing conditions of wind, sun, and rain, beautifully projected on the large background screen with moving soundscape, gave the dance, aptly integrated with the sound and images, a fine sense of thematic cohesion. The folksongs in an old Chinese dialect provided more poetry to the piece.  So, the choreography was excellent, now dynamic and now poetically restrained, now fast and now slow; the dancers equally excelled in their vigor and precision; and the costumes, simple but with carefully coordinated palette, added a flair, all very impressive and satisfying.  

Two days later, I saw Tree of Codes, a production at the Park Avenue Armory, a spectacle by Wayne McGregor choreographer, Olafur Eliasson light designer, and Jamie xx composer, inspired by the book of the same title by Janathan Safran Foer.  Despite the grand scale of the work, it was sorely disappointing.  It lacked any sense of integration between Eliasson’s lighting, itself gimmicky with no coherence, and McGregor’s choreography, itself vigorously athletic but repetitive with no running theme of any sort nor expressive impact and thus boring.  There was some magic in the frontal glass surface serving at once as a reflective mirror and the see-through surface foreground glass wall serving at once as a reflective mirror and the see-through surface.  During the very first scene where the dancers were rigged with lights schematically outlining the dancers, I was thinking that what makes a dance wonderful in live performance is the human body, here concealed; then, in the next scene we saw simulated naked bodies, and they made me think how costumes amplify the bodies in motion.  The play of light for the rest was entirely arbitrary, like a child playing with a flashlight.  It was a striking contrast to the poetically illuminating dance by Cloud Gate.