Date: January 21 & 28, 2005
Time: Friday, 6:00PM to 8:00PM
Place: Martin Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Corner of 34th Street, Manhattan
Nomad: The River, is inspired by Yin Mei’s own search for spiritual meaning – a search which began in a childhood clouded by China’s Cultural Revolution, but blessed by dreams of a world beyond.
Nomad: The River revolves around the symbol of the river – the holy river, the river of life, the river as the source and endpoint of human longing and desire, the river as both sacred and profane reality. The work draws context from two actual rivers – the Yellow River in China and the Ganges in India. The work draws context from two actual rivers – the Yellow River in China and the Ganges in India. Yin Mei grew up along the banks of China’s Yellow River. Known both as the cradle of Chinese civilization and as “China’s Sorrow” due to the tremendous floods arising from it, the Yellow River – named for the mud that clouds its waters – is considered the soul of China. It is, for the Chinese, a locus of ghosts and ghost stories, of mythical happenings, of destruction, of disasters and of transformation. Likewise, for the Indian people, the Ganges is a holy and inviolate body of water – a river from which they drink, on which they cremate their dead in floating pyres, and in which they ritually bathe – despite its being one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth.
The duality represented by these fabled rivers drives the choreography and visual environment of Nomad: The River. The work begins when a young woman walks onto the stage, turns on an old-fashioned radio and stares deeply into its lighted dial. As the music pours forth, it opens up a magical realm of memories, fantasies and transformation. Projections transform the theater space into a world beyond and the stage becomes a river along which a ghostly boat carries the dancers on their journey. With the young woman and her radio serving throughout as a gateway between the physical and the spiritual, the work continually shifts between the longing to escape the world and the rawness and danger of the here-and-now in which we must, inevitably, find our way.
Yin Mei was born in China and started her professional career in traditional Chinese dance during the Cultural Revolution. Before coming to the United States to study modern dance on a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, she was a member of a leading Chinese dance company. Yin Mei now choreographs and performs her contemporary work worldwide, having forged a dance style employing Chinese energy direction and spatial principles as a means of creating dance within the rubric of Western dance-theater.
Yin Mei's most recent work, /Asunder, a multi-media, cross-cultural dance theater work created in collaboration with installation artist Cai Guo-Qiang and composer Robert Een, was produced by MAPP and premiered at Danspace Project in New York in May 2001. /Asunder toured to eleven U.S. cities throughout 2002 to critical and audience acclaim. In December 2002, Yin Mei presented a work-in-progress version of Nomad: The River at Danspace Project at St. Marks Church. Yin Mei's evening-length dance theater work, Empty Tradition/City of Peonies, premiered at the Asia Society in New York City in fall 1998 and was presented at the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival in August 1999. Conceived, choreographed and directed by Yin Mei, Empty Tradition/City of Peonies was the product of a year-long collaboration with Indonesian composer Tony Prabowo and prominent Chinese installation artist Xu Bing. Performers included dancers from Tibet and the U.S., a Buddhist martial artist, seven Indonesian musicians and a violist.
Yin Mei's choreography has been presented at New York venues including: Danspace Project, DTW, La Mama ETC., the Asia Society, the Japan Society, PACE Downtown Theater, the Mulberry Street Theater, Lincoln Center Out-Of-Doors Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Queens College Theater, P.S. 1 and the Knitting Factory. Her work has been presented twice at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, and at U.S. venues including Columbia College Dance Center ( Chicago), UCLA, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of California at Santa Cruz, the Kohler Arts Center ( Wisconsin), University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona State University in Tempe, Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, University of Alaska and Bard College. Internationally, her work has been presented at Tokyo's Theater X, the Hong Kong Town Hall Theatre and the Jerusalem Museum, Chikamatsu Festival (Nagato, Japan), the BBB Festival (Potsdam, Germany), the Indonesian Dance Festival (Jakarta), the Korea International Dance Festival (Seoul) and the Contemporary Dance Festival of West Sumatra. She was one of ten international choreographers invited to participate in the 50th anniversary of the American Dance Festival.
