Dancers exhibit power in precision

by Tom Strini
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 12, 2007

The physics of dance - the visible measurement of thrust, momentum, speed and weight - are rarely as palpable as they are in the body of Li Chiao-Ping. Li and her Madison-based company of five women returned to Milwaukee on Friday for the first time in many years.

Li's solos were the strongest parts of this program. Her unique vocabulary, tinged with Asian martial arts, fits her compact body like a second skin. From her knees to her shoulders, she seems to be a single muscle. You can sense impulse to motion flowing through her torso. Movement starts in the hips and moves up or down in slow undulations or whiplash snaps, or outward with final expression in turns, kicks and potent combinations of both.

Her precise hands and arms can be surprisingly delicate against her powerful body. In a gesture that recurred at intervals through Friday's program, Li stood hands apart, then brought her fingertips together with soft certitude. She separated them on exactly the same plane, as if they were sliding on a cable in opposite directions. She created the illusion of substance in space when there was nothing but air.

The dancers spoke in five of the six live numbers. As Li made the gesture described above, she said, "The shortest distance between two points is a straight line."

Not all of the relations between word and deed were so clear, as various dancers, sometimes breathless from exertion, told stories that seemed to be from their childhoods. Distraction sometimes was an issue. It's hard for a viewer to attend equally to both spoken word and dance steps.

Li partly solved the problem by couching the rhythm of the dance neatly into the rhythm of the spoken prose, so the dance became like a guitar strumming in the background of a song. Less often, the dance had a subtle mimetic relation to the words. One dancer, for example, spoke of impermanence and the fleeting nature of life as she hung her arms and held her palms up and fingers spread, as if sands of time were sifting through her hands.

Filmmaker Douglas Rosenberg, Li's longtime collaborator, screened two beautiful films. In the first, company dancers and elderly volunteers moved in slow motion on a frozen lake. In the second, a stoic, plaintive accordionist played folk tunes, as dancers young and old engaged in simple, tender rituals amid lush, sunlit meadows.

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