The Beijing Dance Festival is co-organized by Beijing Dance/LDTX, Guangdong Modern Dance Company and City Contemporary Dance Company (Hong Kong). Together with the Guangdong Dance Festival and China Dance Forward, they form the biggest contemporary dance network in China.
The Beijing Dance Festival was launched in 2008 and has hosted international and national programs in alternating years. This year, it has evolved to 2-week programs with one week of educational activities and one week of performances and showcases of national and international programs.
The annual modern dance weeks held in both Guangzhou and Beijing are where Tsao finds his audiences. Beijing Modern Dance Week, which started on July 14, features dancers around the world, who perform and give lectures and workshops over two weeks.
More than 500 students have applied for the dance courses. Last year, all the shows of the modern dance week at the National Center for the Performing Arts were sold out. Modern dance is enjoying a big boom because Chinese audiences have started to realize the importance of personal voice.
"Open Source": Beijing Dance Festival Open Source was one of the festival's most well received performances. Drawing on the mystical qualities of surrealism, it re-enacted a young woman's wedding-night journey into an otherworldly dreamscape. The story featured five characters: the girl, her reflection, her husband, her lover, and a hoodie-wearing man of unclear identity. The choreography was powerfully rhythmic and wild, and its structure featured alternating sequences with two, three, and four dancers. Finally, only the man in the hoodie was left on stage, drifting between the realms of dreams and reality as if he himself had controlled the entire story. In this dream, desire is traced back to its origins as animal lust, and then magnified to fill the entire stage. The performance's epilogue was a masterful final stroke: a man and a woman, dimly lit, dancing together, torn apart, trembling and quivering to the point of exhaustion. This doomsday pas de deux is certain to linger in the minds of the audience for some time.
"Blinded Mind": Beijing Dance Festival Blinded Mind, by the Susanna Leinonen Company of Finland, was the grand finale of the festival. The dance began with a twenty-minute video, which employed high-speed capture to prolong the sudden movements of the dancers' bodies, creating a sense of architecture in motion. The most stunning moment of the performance came when a female dancer took the stage in a white gauze skirt that trailed onto the ground. The lighting silhouetted her figure and the lines of the gauze, which was blown into the air around her by a fan as she danced. Finally, an enveloping mist spread across the stage and appeared to swallow her up as she disappeared at the end of the stage. The entire performance was cool, precise, restrained, tense, spacious, mysterious, and deep, and it felt as though a gust of cold, northern European wind had filled the theatre.
Date: July 12-25, 2014
