Huang Yi's Wicked Fish (2009) had me from hello and, I'll admit, spoiled me for what came after in this roughly two-hour evening. A more seamless, perfect marriage of movement and dancers--let alone dancers and lighting--I cannot imagine. With nothing hokey, obvious or the least bit tentative, Huang and lighting designer Lee Chien-chang evoke a deep sea world of darkness and sudden, mysterious illumination, of increasingly swift, fluent motion. The ensemble--thirteen dancers including Huang--exhibits potent technique, guts and believability. This work leaves me astonished, once again, at how the human body can transform to make art, how the energy of the body can transform to make magic(k).
Huang Yi's whimsical Ta-Ta For Now, set to a Khachaturian violin concerto, opens with the image of a guy tying his shoelaces and pedaling his floating feet like an astronaut in free fall. I really want to see what follows here--a quintet of dancers perched and rhythmically, goofily interacting across a row of folding chairs--back-to-back with Camille A. Brown's The Groove to Nobody's Business, although Huang serves up his own clever, cutesy groove. He's a confident artist, an audacious one, and I want to see more of what he's got up his sleeve.
Cloud Gate 2 appears again at the The Joyce on Friday night at 8pm and Sunday at 2pm and 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.
The Joyce Theater
Eight Avenue and 19th Street, Manhattan
(directions)
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