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Speaking with a choreographic vocabulary as refined and nuanced as any language, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers fluently communicates abstract yet familiar concepts not with spoken words and sentences, but with phrases of movement.
The dance company, based at the CHI Movement Arts Center, 1316 S. Ninth St., presented “AUTUMN SKIN: Journey of East/West” at the Painted Bride Art Center March 18 to 20. The performance, choreographed by Kun-Yang Lin, was comprised of an earlier piece, “Traces of Brush,” and the premiere of “Autumn Skin.”
“Traces of Brush,” first performed in 2005, melds the ancient art of Chinese calligraphy and dance. The piece begins with a spoken segment accompanying a lone dancer slowly and smoothly twisting his body across the stage while eliciting rain-like sounds from the elongated instrument he holds with both hands. Six dancers dressed in black morph into a calligraphist’s tools with the space around them becoming their three-dimensional scroll. Alternately sudden and sustained movements are interwoven with stillness — a sort of punctuation that provides connectivity, and comfortably settles within the movement instead of halting it. The dancers boldly sweep, slice and arc through space, at times interacting with each other through fearless partnering sequences.
At the heart of the piece, Eiren Shuman performed an intense, Eastern-inspired solo. The dancer, an understudy for Lin, appeared on stage with a fan held up by his mouth shielding his face and red markings on his bare chest. With legs wide-set and knees bent for the majority of the solo, he executed rapid-fire, controlled writing movements with his hands, sharply etching characters into the space in front of him.
During the first part of the piece, five dancers exit the stage, leaving Jillian Harris to perform a solo. Energy that starts in her swiveling hips radiates out through her limbs like the ink of a brush stroke feathering to a point. She repeatedly exhibits control of the movement through suspended turns and seemingly effortless wavelike motions.
Music with a distinctive Eastern quality contributes to the theme of the piece without detracting from the choreography while stark lighting intensifies the overall aesthetic of the piece.
The second piece, “Autumn Skin,” shows the dancers in a different — much more human — light. The raw emotion and intensity embedded in the choreography gives access to the dancers’ souls leaving the impression of knowing those six people far more deeply than just as performers after the lights go out.
At the beginning of the piece, dancers dressed in more pedestrian-style clothing repeat a movement phrase in unison, conveying the idea of a larger community they as individuals exist within. Their random deviations from the group and their quick action to dissolve back in suggest that individuality is inevitable, but not always embraced by the self.
During the course of the piece, the audience becomes witness to multiple relationships, each with its own unique dialogue of movement between two people. Something hauntingly familiar exists in the beautiful, often heart-wrenching chemistry within each pair, illustrating the effects human beings have on one another and the emotional ties that hold them together, drive them apart or simultaneously do both.
Moments of tension, outburst and stillness give the piece a feeling of being jarred out of comfortability, a process by which the dancers strip away layers of constraints. Varying music selections help separate the piece into stages, a concept the choreography already implies. Lighting ranges from very bright (the piece begins while audience members can still clearly see each other) to very dark, ending with a sort of mild strobe effect as lights alternate back and forth.
The marriage of Eastern influences and Western contemporary dance lends an organic aesthetic to the movement style of the company. “AUTUMN SKIN: Journey of East/West” demonstrated the company’s versatility, technical proficiency, and capability of producing choreography both poignant and culturally relevant.
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