Nai-Ni Chen’s Unbroken
Thread
by R. Pikser
Watching dance on a screen too often undercuts the very energy
that makes dance a pleasure. But sometimes the screen brings something
new to a piece. In this instance, Nai-Ni Chen’s Unbroken Thread,
originally performed in 2003 and now seen on the screen, is improved by the
medium. The idea behind the piece is that the dancers and, by extension,
the rest of us, are caught in the web of existence. We are all connected
by this thread from before our birth, throughout the experiences of life, until
our death and rebirth.
The lighting by A. C. Hickox, generally dark, focuses our
attention by putting light exactly where the designer wants it to be and
nowhere else, as Robert Edmond Jones admonishes. Not only the lighting,
but the camera work by Penny Ward, and the editing by Ms. Chen herself, direct
our focus. We see this thigh, that arm, a back, so that the dancers
appear almost disembodied as we see them at first climbing, or perhaps caught
in, the suspended rope basket-like, or trap-like sculpture, designed by Myung
Hee Cho with assistance from Mikiko Suzuki.
After a while, we are permitted to see the floor below the
sculpture where we see other dancers, trying to move beyond the space where
they are, though they cannot because they are attached by longer or shorter
ropes wrapped around their waists to the larger sculpture.
The music, created for this piece by Jason Kao Hwang, who is also
the violin soloist, begets its own, parallel world of extended, attenuated
sounds, much like a thread, and might be called otherworldly, except that it
conveys the travails of this world as we see the dancers struggling or,
occasionally, reveling in their movement as they come together or persist on
their own.
In different sections of the piece the rope is presented
differently. If it forms a trap in the first section, later on it seems
malleable, perhaps controllable, as the dancers bend and shape their ropes;
however, they are still attached. Sometimes the rope is represented by a
scarf and seems softer. But it is always there, attaching the dancer to
itself or attaching the dancers to each other.
In the final section, which Ms. Chen likens to a funeral
procession, the rope is enormous and apparently very heavy, as we see the
dancers using a lot of energy to carry it as they progress on their
journey. In this section the dancers they help each other in their
task. The rope has become a connection, not only a limitation or
something to struggle against. Throughout the piece, in spite of some
sections of flinging motion, time seems slow and enduring, paralleling the flow
of life, or perhaps the way life pulls us along without our volition.
Unbroken Thread, especially in this very focused
presentation, is a most appropriate piece for this time when we are all
especially aware of our mortality and our days can seem long and our time
fleeting.
Nai-Ni Chen
December 5th, 2020
Online
Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company
800-650-0246
www.nainichen.org
Contact: Michelle Tabnick
www.michelletabnickpr.com