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Dynasties
Limón Dance Company at the Tsai; Ping Chong in NYC
BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL


Related Links

Limón Dance Company's official Web site

Tsai Performance Center's Web site

Ping Chong and Company's official Web site

The New Victory Theater's official Web site

Nearly nine decades of modern dance filtered into the José Limón company’s Bank of America Celebrity Series appearance last weekend at the Tsai Performance Center. Established in 1946 by the great choreographer Doris Humphrey and her most important protégé, Limón Dance Company has come through an administrative crisis in the past year and emerged looking confident, cohesive.

Unlike her fellow modern-dance matriarch Martha Graham, Humphrey mentored younger artists and encouraged revivals. She wanted her æsthetic to serve as inspiration for a later time. Humphrey died in 1958. Limón’s own choreography always bore her influence, but he paid her a direct tribute in 1964 with A Choreographic Offering. Set to Bach’s Musical Offering, the long work orchestrated movement themes from 15 of Humphrey’s dances choreographed between 1928 and 1953 and was edited by Daniel Lewis after Limón’s death in 1972. The seven-section suite now has a new production with handsome costumes by Marion Williams.

Choreographic Offering is a pure-dance exposition of the grandeur and humanism that identifies the Humphrey-Limón tradition. The solos and duets allow for individual personalities to emerge — Sunday I saw Kurt Douglas, Ryoko Kudo, Roxane D’Orléans Juste, and Raphaël Boumaïla in featured roles.

In the group sections, the six men and eight women stream through in lines and circular pathways, forming complementary small units and canons. Like Bach, the choral sections never seem cluttered or confusing and always reinforce the sense of a community. The sculptural, weighted body movement evokes the streamlined urbanism of 1930s buildings and design that surrounded Humphrey in the years when she was making her most utopian works. For Humphrey-Limón dancers, space is a three-dimensional adventure.

Raphaël Boumaïla took the Othello role in Limón’s great 1949 gloss on Shakespeare, The Moor’s Pavane, with Brenna Monroe-Cook as the Moor’s Wife, Jonathan Riedel as His Friend, and Roxane D’Orléans Juste as His Friend’s Wife. This is about as perfect a piece of dramatic choreography as modern dance has produced. Limón told the story in concise encounters between pairs of characters, within the framework of an increasingly fragmented courtly dance set to music by Henry Purcell. This cast performed it as if they were living it for the first time.

The company brought a world premiere to Boston, Lar Lubovitch’s Recordare ("Remember"), a danse macabre in folk style based on Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations. Lubovitch is Juilliard-trained and has choreographed a large eclectic repertory, but it was José Limón who inspired him to switch from art to dance studies, and the Humphrey-Limón style of rhythmic, luxurious body language underlies all his choreography. Recordare also pays tribute to Limón’s Mexican heritage, and to the series of dances Limón made on Mexican history and customs in the 1950s.

Recordare begins with a funeral procession. Then the mourners don masks and enact little skits in superstitious defiance of a skeletal Death figure (Francisco Ruvalcaba). Selections from Elliot Goldenthal’s fascinating Juan Darien: A Carnival Mass weave the Catholic Mass in Latin and Spanish into a contemporary musical fabric that includes mariachis and dance rhythms.

Death appears from behind the curtains of a theater booth to chase a cartoonish bride and groom with a meat cleaver. Pretending to be an angel, he showers petals over the hacked-up groom and brings him back to life. A pot-bellied red Devil joins the peasants’ dance, and the most terrifying part of the Mass, the Dies Irae, infects the music. Death impersonates a prostitute with gigantic breasts to seduce a drunken cowboy. The Virgin Mary cures a crippled man and carries him off tenderly. The villagers dance in a ring, but Death dances right beside them, only temporarily appeased.

New York author/director Ping Chong is absorbed with histories and ethnographies of a different kind. Cathay: Three Tales of China, which opened last week at the New Victory Theater on 42nd Street and continues through November 13, links ancient China with the Japanese occupation in World War II and globalized China today. Chong worked with the Shaanxi Folk Art Theater of northwest China to develop his concept; it was augmented by the Carter Family Puppet Theater from Seattle, where the piece was premiered. But Cathay is more than a puppet show.

The three stories are told with rod and shadow puppets in scenes that materialize in a proscenium-high wall divided into 25 panels. Instead of taking up the whole space, the individual scenes shift in location and scale, as if this were a movie, from miniature villas and caravans to close-up dialogues between characters. A tiny rod puppet does a scarf dance. There’s a frightening simulated cock fight. Fat disembodied heads gossip and scheme.

The first story takes place in the T’ang dynasty. The relatives of the emperor’s favorite wife intrigue within the palace, and when the country is attacked, the army threatens a revolt unless the corrupt regime ends. Lady Yang hangs herself to save the country. The puppets and the beautiful decors are done in traditional style, with painted and projected backgrounds.

The second play has realistic shadow puppets and looks like a 1940s comic strip. A peasant family gets separated during an air raid. The young boy, the only survivor, wanders the countryside. On the verge of starvation, he steals food from the occupying soldiers. He’s caught and apparently shot, but we discover later that his assigned executioner has spared him.

They meet again in a later life, as do the other characters from both tales, as travelers and businessmen in a modern commercial hotel. Chong’s ingenious device for holding it all together is that we’re looking at the site of the T’ang emperor’s tomb. Two immense guardian-beast puppets are stationed at the entrance to the tomb, and they provide comic relief around the three stories. They’re bored with their job and with each other after a thousand years of watchfulness, but they’re philosophical about it.

Before the last play, we hear voices and the sound of anthropologists digging into the tomb. Next thing you know, the place has turned into a theme hotel, with each of its 11 floors named for a different Chinese ruling family. Reincarnated as a desk clerk, Lady Yang finds her love again in the elevator, and the grown-up peasant boy takes his merciful adversary to dinner.

Now the entrance to the tomb is a hotel lobby, and one of the guardians mulls over the changing scene: "By the time we pay off our karmic debt, who knows what China will look like?" The whole backdrop fills with films of urban streets, crowds, and traffic, environmentally ominous but full of life.

The 90-minute show seemed a bit halting, and this may have been due to the fact that the script was pre-recorded by American voices. The additional layer of Chinese/American fusion wasn’t the problem; the action was so skillful and swift, it outraced the words at times. But the show was impeccably done in its visuals, with all the elements flawlessly engineered together.

By the end of it, Ping Chong has told more than an entertaining tale. He’s commented on the way cultures clash and overrun one another and somehow turn into a new thing. And he shows how events half-forgotten can live on as myth.


Issue Date: November 4 - 10, 2005
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