Stripped bare: Li Chiao-Ping makes minimalist magic

by Susan Kepecs
Isthmus, January 25, 2002

Last weekend Li Chiao-Ping Dance presented their “Small Works” in the Civic Center’s Spotlight Room, Madison’s artiest-looking little high-rent performance space. Fourteen works were split into two programs. The seven offerings of Program A included a mini-retrospective of Li’s works, performed by company members, and the world premiere of a new piece she choreographed for herself. Running through most of the dances is the UW prof’s particular brand of postmodern minimalism, exploring relationships between movement, sound, and space, without plot or emotion. Li updates this genre with spare, fierce, multicultural technique.

Two solos, “Corpus Callosum” (danced by Andrea Harris) and “Refrain” (danced by Lori Dillon), opened the program. Both pieces feature a vocabulary of expressive arm work, angular, turned-in positions and repetitive patterns that move from isolated body parts to zigs through space. They differ in tone – “Corpus,” set to an electronic warp-core score, is all neurons and synapses. “Refrain,” danced to Wagner, teeters like a ballerina out of kilter. There’s an idiosyncratic elegance to these works, but the gestalt is alienating and disaffected.

“Mandala,” set to percussion music from China, also falls into Li’s minimalist bag. But it’s very clean and focused, and Stacey Carlson’s finely tuned dancing was thoroughly engaging.

Another gem was “Sen,” danced by Yun-Chen Liu. Liu is a fabulously strong dancer with background in ballet and Chinese dance and opera. The piece is more organic than angular. Wearing flowered gauze pants and a green crop top, Liu waved like wheat and tossed like jelly-fish on rolling seas.

“Residues,” danced by Carlson and Liu, was playful, and the duet form added a whole new set of dynamics to the stripped-down esthetic that prevailed in this concert.

Li’s world premiere, “Amnesia or momentary lapses of consciousness,” was an expressionist departure from the previous works. It opens with Li, in shirt and pants, telling a story about a women who wakes up to find herself suddenly transformed by age. As the narrative ends she’s searching rooms and old pictures for her identity. The jazzy, slightly wild solo that follows – punctuated, as the title promises, with blackouts – suggests a scary path to newfound freedoms. Finally Li walks offstage. She scrutinizes some framed photos that miraculously appear on the ex-ticket table that’s perched by the doors of the Civic Center’s freight elevator. She wills the lift open with a forceful stare, disappearing inside as five dancers in Capezio combat boots and pseudo tutus emerge. It’s a seamless transition to the next piece, “Gó.”

“Gó” is a fun, edgy work that premiered in Milwaukee in ’95 and was resurrected last fall on campus, though this is the first time I’ve seen it. It’s a crowd-pleaser. Women warriors-cum-punk-ballerinas stomp out out a sort-of Swan Lake that’s loaded with references that are anything but classical.

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