Gems at home

Gems of the Far East
Butler Ballet
Feb. 25-26

Butler Ballet’s 2005 spring concert will be remembered as an inspired program showcasing the artistry of Jao-Hsun Tseng from the National Taiwan University of the Arts. It will be marked as the point where faculty choreography and student dancing achieved a high point commensurate with professional companies.

Certainly, Tseng was the star with her absolutely gorgeous “Ribbon Dance,” equal in majesty and grace to her preceding fan interlude. Her wrist movements would daunt basketball pros and flummux batters if she were pitching to them. She is an artist one can watch and go home enlightened and transfixed. Yet there was much more to the program.

During her three-week residency, Butler students mastered the fleet foot movements, bending and leaning at the waist, tilt of head, outward turn of palm, precise finger placement, showing character through eyes, and the use of hand props that are characteristic of Chinese dance.

The 14 Butler dancers who performed the “Indigenous Taiwanese Dance” choreographed by Tseng were zestful in their use of bamboo sticks and colorful in the authentic costumes shipped from Taiwan. They showed how closely allied one indigenous dance is to another. Echoes of American Indian dance were evident throughout this piece emanating from the mountains of Taiwan.

Yet it was the look and feel of the other works that brought me back to 1948 when I witnessed dance history in the “undressed” Balanchine ballets in New York City. The power and beauty of production austerity rendered by Isamu Noguchi, Japanese-American modernist sculptor, became the consummate counterpoint to Balanchine’s idea of a distinctive American aesthetic. Costumes were clean-lined add-ons to rehearsal clothing, the stage was bare, lighting was emotion-hued.

The layering of this half-century of American aesthetic, atop the centuries-old aesthetic of the Far East, atop the cultural heritage and training of each Butler Ballet faculty member demonstrated an extended dance vocabulary that may well resound into the larger dance world with this new generation of Indianapolis-trained dancers.

The dancing in each of the works was outstanding. The movements and tempo associated with the Far East were integral to the choreography, set on music played on authentic instruments such as the pipa and erhu, gongs, cymbals, bells. It was seamless performance on all levels.

Yet the one work that stands out is “Farewell to the Singing Earth” by Stephan Laurent. The work is set on the last section of Gustav Mahler’s song cycle, Das Lied van der Erde, which is based on poems of the Tang Dynasty (seventh to eighth centuries). The sentiments bring us to an intimate connection with ourselves as sojourners on Earth. Our humanity in death is knowing birth is the continuity.

Laurent’s flowing, lyrical choreography moves dancers in and out of undulating groupings of waves. Configurations from point to floor take flight in split-second jumps and tosses. Mahler’s slow movement is filled with a sense of eternal peace undergirded by trials that tested but never swayed the voyager from undertaking his life’s work. This is a profoundly beautiful work, as glowingly emerging from the music as if it were a sculpture by Michelangelo.