Game Theory

At Beijing LDTX Modern Dance Company's Oct. 23 performance, it was anyone's guess what the regimented moves onstage actually meant.

by Janet Anderson

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Published: Oct 30, 2007

The enigmatic, sometimes downright obscure Beijing LDTX Modern Dance Company laid out tae kwon do mats on Annenberg's stage like a large game board last week. Specifically, it was a reference to the Chinese board game go (wiegi), with the dancers wearing black and white to represent the stone pieces used in this game. The Cold Dagger choreographers Li Han-Zhong and Ma Bo sent 14 excellent dancers resolutely moving across this space — part game strategy, part attack.

LDTX is English for Leidong Tianxia, and if that doesn't clarify things for you, then be glad you were not at this performance. Because except for being consistently quite pretty in an abstract way, it was anyone's guess what the regimented moves onstage actually meant. The choreographers mixed modern dance, martial arts, pilates and yoga. One beautiful sequence had dancers seated in the lotus position each in a pool of light. The mood throughout is overwhelmingly one of grief and loss.

Dancers advance and retreat. Their costumes are all black or all white and virtually unisex; even men wear skirts. The skirts are props that become veils, or even capes flourished matador-like for other dancers to push through like bulls. Dancers repeatedly crash to the floor and stay there. In one case a woman in white falls flat on the floor and the other dancers drop down next to her, placing their heads against her body forming a huge circle of grief. She is carried offstage prone across the top of men's heads.

The piece is excruciatingly strange, and filled with silences so profound you can hear people yawning. At the end, a man lashes a long ribbon banner around the stage like a whip while dancers cower at the edge of the game board. He falls, apparently the victim of his own violence. Dancers inspect him then creep away to the edge of the game board and pick it up only to disappear beneath it. The game board ripples while bodies squirm below. Here and there a piece of the board pops loose and a dancer peers out at the audience.

Overall The Cold Dagger is often beautiful, but it is always strange. Dirge-like cello music by American David Darling accompanied all this. Artistic director Willy Tsao seems to want it both ways — the mystery of the Orient, and the precision of the West.

(d_kasrel@citypaper.net)

Beijing LDTX Modern Dance Company

Oct. 23, Annenberg Center

 

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