{"id":49577,"date":"2020-02-08T11:31:42","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T17:31:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=49577"},"modified":"2020-02-13T09:58:03","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T15:58:03","slug":"is-guangdongs-beyond-calligraphy-modern-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/is-guangdongs-beyond-calligraphy-modern-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Guangdong’s\u00a0“Beyond Calligraphy”\u00a0Modern Dance ?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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courtesy of UtahPresents<\/p><\/div>\n

Dear dance lover,<\/p>\n

Whether or not you attended Guangdong Modern Dance Company\u2019s\u00a0Beyond Calligraphy\u00a0<\/em>at Kingsbury Hall on Tuesday, I have some questions for you regarding this idea of modern dance. It is inevitable that upon entering a Lyft to be chauffeured to my classes at the U\u2019s Marriott Center for Dance (an embarrassingly frequent amount of times because of my complicated relationship with time \u2026 more on that later), the driver will ask what kind of dance I do. When I respond with \u201cmodern dance,\u201d I\u2019m often bombarded with a litany of questions that I can never find quite the right answers to (fellow non-driving mods, I\u00a0know<\/em>\u00a0you can relate). The most common being, \u201cWhat does that look like?\u201d The most concise answer I can give, after I\u2019ve kicked myself for not just answering \u201cballet\u201d to their initial query, is \u201ca lot of things, it depends on the choreographer.\u201d<\/p>\n

To Guangdong\u2019s choreographer Liu Qi, modern dance looks angular, precise, and deliberate. It flows from one shape into another at a pace that\u2019s slow enough that we see almost every detail of the transition, but also quick enough that the entire body of the dancer remains in constant motion. Incredibly strong with extreme attention to detail, the choreography increases in speed and dynamism from one piece to the next. This was true for the first act of\u00a0Beyond Calligraphy<\/em>, at least, which included five dances that were \u201cdeveloped from the stylistic essence of different Chinese scripts\u201d according to the program. I attended the pre-show calligraphy lecture and demonstration with calligraphy master Xie Feidong, hoping to glean insight into the creative process for this performance. Calligraphy\u2019s influence on the movement was evident after Feidong\u2019s presentation, which detailed the development of several characters over centuries, and I even left with a calligraphic creation of my own \u2013 the word \u201chappiness\u201d on red paper embellished with golden threads. Oh how I love a keepsake!<\/p>\n

The second act was quite a contrast to the first, consisting of only one piece that moved entirely in slow motion. It spoke to my sloth sensibilities, the ones that cause me to miss the bus and rely on Lyft, as mentioned earlier. As a self-identifying human sloth, I can tell you that there is a lot of pressure to speed up, get on with it, move at a more \u201cproductive\u201d pace. Ten minutes into this piece, I sensed some of the audience wishing the same from the dancers. Truth be told, I cannot relay any of the choreography of this act to you. The dancers moved so slowly that I stopped looking at them. It felt okay to do this, like I had received permission to ignore the details of the movement and focus instead on the trance-like ambiance that was created by the combination of slow-moving bodies, instrumental music, and video projections of serene nature scenes. I allowed myself to get lost in time and only occasionally snapped back to ponder if the constantly evolving video projections, which reminded me too much of a computer\u2019s default nature screensaver, were significant landscapes of China or random stock images.<\/p>\n

Several of my friends in attendance expressed that they were expecting the performance to be better; one said that movement seemed more balletic than modern. I felt conflicted in this conversation. Judging the performance as better or worse, good or bad didn\u2019t seem relevant. It felt more important to acknowledge that we had just seen Chinese Modern Dance, which will inevitably differ from American Modern Dance. I\u2019m currently gathering, through dialogue about dance pedagogy across the country, that Chinese perspectives and histories (and really, many other perspectives and histories that aren\u2019t Eurocentric) are rarely shared in dance programs. Guangdong was established in 1991, approximately 90 years after the American claim on modern dance. How do we observe and study what \u201cmodern\u201d means across the globe, acknowledging that cultures shift on different timelines because of different societal needs and demands, without imposing our Western\/Eurocentric sensibilities? As eclectic as modern dance is, and as hard as we claim it is to concisely define, why are we so quick to discredit other cultural approaches to modern dance as, indeed, modern? Kudos to Brooke Horejsi and Utah Presents for sharing this company with us, and may we continue to expose our Salt Lake dance community to culturally diverse presentations and interpretations of modern dance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear dance lover, Whether or not you attended Guangdong Modern Dance Company\u2019s\u00a0Beyond Calligraphy\u00a0at Kingsbury Hall on Tuesday, I have some questions for you regarding this idea of modern dance. It is inevitable that upon entering a Lyft to be chauffeured to my classes at the U\u2019s Marriott Center […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1662,"featured_media":49578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/Guangdong.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-13 20:55:08","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49577"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49579,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49577\/revisions\/49579"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}