By Sheila Abrams
In an explosion of color, shape and sound, the extraordinary Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company dazzled an audience in Hackettstown Saturday evening, March 28, as the centerpiece of Centenary College’s annual spring Dance Fest.
The event, held on the stage of the Sitnik Theater in the Lackland Center, brings some of New Jersey’s top professional dance companies to perform for the college’s dance students (Centenary offers a major in dance) as well as local devotees who normally have to travel to other parts of the state to see these artists.
Nai-Ni Chen founded her unique modern dance troupe in 1988, shortly after emigrating from Taiwan. Since that time, she has created a company of exemplary dancers performing a repertoire like no other. Chen’s choreography interweaves elements of ancient Chinese dance forms with strains of contemporary culture, the immigrant experience and life in today’s America.
The program offered at Centenary was very varied. The first piece, for example, Peach Flower Landscape, was excerpted from a longer work created by Chen in 1995 but based on a Chinese legend from the fourth century. Performed to Chinese folk music, it featured five women in traditional robes, moving in a subtle, flowing way that called to mind ancient paintings.
As if by a tsunami, that subtle mood was swept away in the dynamic second piece, Calligraffiti. Huang Ruo’s score was aggressively unsubtle, as eight dancers in androgynous garb, appeared before a constantly changing backdrop, which flowed from graceful Chinese calligraphy to modern graffiti that was often hypnotic. (We could not find in the program a credit for the backdrop designs, which were absolutely critical to the success of the piece.)
If the beautiful ladies in the first dance were subtle and painting-like, the dancers in the second were as tough and bellicose as the music, energetic, athletic and powerful. The strength of the women was so notable that it was not always clear which dancers were men and which were women. The piece was breathtaking.
The first two works set the mood for an extensive program that ran the gamut from the delicate and traditional to the aggressively modern. The choreographer herself was beautiful and intriguing in the traditional Passage to the Silk River, in which the costume, a white kimono with extremely long sleeves played an important part in the dancing.
Chen also used other props as integral to the choreography. Fans not only added visually but musically as well, their snapping open and closed serving as a percussion instrument. At one moment, the fans also became swords! Umbrellas also became part of one dance (just as they do in the Alvin Ailey repertory.)
This company, a quarter of a century old and constantly a vital member of the New Jersey dance community, has only gotten better over the years. Bravo!
