In ANTONIONI IN CHINA (working title), choreographer Yin Mei conjures a dance theater “conversation” with iconic Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni’s rarely-seen documentary film “Chung Kuo”. Shot in China during the Cultural Revolution, “Chung Kuo” offers a window into a time Yin Mei herself lived through – a time of chaos that marked a generation of Chinese. In creating this work, the choreographer finds inspiration in Antonioni’s minimalist and “architectural” approach to film – an approach which confounded the Chinese government when “Chung Kuo” was released and led to a yearlong political campaign against “foreign things” which Yin Mei participated in as a child. The choreographic “conversation” also looks back to the legend of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” – a group of Daoist-inspired scholar-artists of the third century CE who are revered in China as much for their love of wine and poetry as for their willingness to challenge the moral corruption of the Imperial Court. Chinese artists today look to their example in navigating the difficult cultural and political waters of a globalizing nation. Collaborating with Yin Mei on ANTONIONI IN CHINA are experimental theater director Jay Scheib, who will employ a “live cinema” approach in creating the stage environment for the work, and Korean-American multi-instrumentalist, composer and performer Bora Yoon, who will compose the music and perform live. Contemporary Chinese artist Hong Lei also joins the project to assist with art design. Melding computer-projected images drawn from “Chung Kuo” with real-time images of the live performers – and touching on themes that resonate both backwards and forwards in time – ANTONIONI IN CHINA offers a “mashup” of avant garde stage technologies, magnetic music and fervid movement to tell the story of a moment in time when art and political theater collided.
Background
In 1974, the Chinese Communists invited iconic Italian neo-realist director Michelangelo Antonioni to make a documentary film in China. The resulting work, "Chung Kuo" ("China"), offered a portrait of the Cultural Revolution at its height. While true to Antonioni’s minimalist vision, the film provided ammunition to party hardliners looking for a way to attack rivals, who professed outrage upon its release at the director's decision to portray "ugly things" – ordinary people going about their daily lives – rather than the grand achievements of Mao's revolution (bridges, factories, happy workers, etc.). The Communists wanted cliches, Antonioni gave them life. A yearlong political campaign – essentially, a gigantic performance art piece – was mounted against the work, in which a billion Chinese – including Yin Mei herself – were mobilized to protest a film they had never seen by a director they had never heard of. As Susan Sontag notes in "On Photography", this event offers the ultimate clash in perspectives between a Western individualist view of the photographer and photography, and the views of the Communist Party, and of Chinese culture in general, that art should serve preordained agendas.
In 1974, Yin Mei joined a professional Chinese dance company as a child performer - and she too protested “Chung Kuo” in chants and marches. But she secretly harbored her own individualist proclivities – proclivities born of a family history that had marked both her and a beloved brother as outliers in a culture that deified conformity. In a milieu in which the slightest physical or other difference attracted gossip and abuse, Yin Mei's brother – a brilliant child born an albino – was stared and jeered at from birth, the neighbors calling him a white "ghost" who marked his family as a stranger to Mao's "perfect" revolution. By contrast, Yin Mei – healthy, attractive, talented – personified the ideals of that revolution. The conflict this divergent treatment set up within her marked her for life. At times worshiping, at times resenting her brother, Yin Mei internalized his suffering, ultimately coming to the realization that her relationship with him was a key to her lifelong desire to become an artist.
ANTONIONI IN CHINA explores this complex narrative arc from within the frame of Antonioni’s vision, employing cutting-edge projection technologies to blur the line between the life Yin Mei lived and Antonioni filmed. Envisioned as a “conversation” between and among differing art forms, the work seamlessly weaves together image, sound and movement to create a work of dance theater alchemy. Multiple onstage screens and surfaces construct, deconstruct and reconstruct Antonioni's “Chung Kuo”, commingling images from the film with recent video shot in China in some of the same places where Antonioni placed his camera. These images, in turn, will merge with images of the live performers shot in real time. In this way, the real and the unreal, the concrete and the virtual, are drawn into a powerful dynamic. Offering a three-dimensional dream landscape in which art and imagination burst their boundaries to proffer escape from searing memories, the work features a character modeled on Yin Mei's brother who, endowed with surreal and magical powers, guides viewers like Charon on the river Styx into a deep place in which theatrical expectations are confounded.
In making this work, Yin Mei has also been inspired by the legend of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” – and, in particular, the portrayal of that legend by the contemporary Chinese photographic artist, Hong Lei, who created a famous series of photographs in which the seven sages were portrayed as seven high fashion female supermodels. Hong’s gorgeous photographs both paid homage to and subverted the Chinese hagiography around this subject, an artistic approach that dovetails with the choreographer’s approach to dance theater in this and her other works.
Traversing the line between the historical and the personal, the past and the present, ANTONIONI IN CHINA reflects the experience of a generation of artists raised during the Cultural Revolution, a generation that struggled to achieve an identity from the ashes of China's abandoned culture – a generation for whom culture itself was turned into a shifting series of meaningless surfaces.
Production/Technical
The artistic team for ANTONIONI IN CHINA includes Korean-American composer/performer Bora Yoon, who will compose and perform the music live, and experimental theater director and multimedia specialist Jay Scheib, who will create the complex stage environment and co-direct with Yin Mei. The artist Hong Lei will create the art design for the work. Aaron Harrow, of New York-based production/design house 3-Legged Dog, is Technical Director.
ANTONIONI IN CHINA is the culmination for Yin Mei of several themes and elements that have characterized her longtime ouevre – brilliant collaborators, complex stage environments, dreamlike choreography – while also demonstrating her recent turn toward large-scale works created with established professional dance companies in her native China. (See, e.g., “A Scent of Time”.) Working on both the artistic and academic/cultural levels, Yin Mei is facilitating exchanges between the Chinese dance world and the world of emerging and experimental dance in the U.S. As with all her work, ANTONIONI IN CHINA melds Asian performance traditions with contemporary dance and performative genres to create a form of dance theater that eschews categorization.