Review: Audience takes pleasure, mostly, in Li Chiao-Ping’s pain

By Jay Rath
Wisconsin State Journal, March 9, 2004

Pain is a common enough dramatic theme, but it’s seldom embraced as boldly or baldly as in “Painkillers,” the latest from Li Chiao-Ping Dance. The dark and disturbing multimedia modern dance concert was performed last weekend on the UW-Madison campus.

Physical pain has been a source of inspiration for Li and her Madison-based company since the nationally lauded choreographer was severely injured in a 1999 auto accident. Her “Venous Flow: States of Grace” was frankly autobiographical, for example.

Now, with visual artist and co-creator Douglas Rosenberg, Li has turned outward, to embrace all pain – physical, emotional, and spiritual – but in others. To underscore this, she begins the work by informing the audience, “It’s not me.”

Of course, it is Li. It could hardly be anyone else. But as huge, close-up confessions of the dancers are projected throughout the performance, it’s clear that many types of suffering and many kinds of people are the main subject.

Images of pain as birth, growth and even orgasm are disturbingly danced as the performance unfolds. The concert roils and writhes and it’s barely unrelieved, until the transformative power of pain is frankly narrated.

“Painkillers” comprises nine dances, often unconnected or underscored by Rosenberg’s stark video imagery and the sometimes pleasant but usually dissonant original music by Daniel Feiler, Ryan Smith, and Stephen Vitiello.

The tone and themes are immediately set by “Amnesia,” featuring three large screens of Li half-naked, gasping white fluid, dissolving to pastoral clouds – into which then fly flocks of black birds.

“Onset/Falling” outlines pain’s duality, with the company writihing individually but in unison, mostly facing away, topless, alternately flying or floating, trembling or beating wings.

By structure, the resolution ought to build and arrive in the last three pieces, “Avoidance/Attraction,” “Lone,” and “Comeandgo.” Visual and narrated themes are developed and recapped, solo and full company, but the main themes are firmly in place earlier.

“Holding,” “Black and Blue” and “Grafting” segue from physical to emotional pain, with a recitation of an endless prescription list. That element is similar to Li’s earlier “Venous Flow,” as are the rapidly projected X-ray images.

A catharsis of sorts begins to be suggested by “Other,” superbly danced by Robin Baartman and Collette Stewart, all slow-motion acrobatics, suggesting both romantic embrace and, bizarrely, the Heimlich maneuver. In fact, some might argue that Li never ultimately resolves the pain/growth paradigm she sets up; but that’s probably her point.

The near-capacity audience at Saturday’s performance, the last of three in the Margaret H’Doubler Performance Space of the UW’s Lathrop Hall, was appreciative. Still – probably gratifying to Li – there was a lot of hushed debate as the crowd exited.

“Painkillers” will be performed later this year by Li Chiao-Ping Dance at Illinois Wesleyan University and at Dance Place in Washington, D.C. The company also will be featured at the opening of Madison’s Overture Center in September.

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