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| | Photo by Gene Hale | | | Tzu-Ying Lee and Kuan-Yu Chen
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Hard to Focus
Tipsy Point at Center for Performance Research
By QUINN BATSON
Offoffoff.com
Mea culpa: there are times I cannot absorb or retain enough of a show to review it fully, through distraction or lateness. So it is with Tipsy Point, presented at the new CPR (Center for Performance Research) ground-floor studio.
The title piece that ended the show is mostly an extended improvisation with no clear ground rules, fun but flimsy. 13 people are listed as being onstage, and even that seems an undercount. Big moshing groups fill the center of the stage and little lolling duos and singles line the walls. Like several pieces on the program, no one person is credited for choreography; it is more a semiplanned jam than something set and formed. And in that way, it seems well suited to a Center for Performance Research; much of the evening had a similar research quality, in which techniques of presentation are floated as trial balloons for a receptive audience.
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| CHEN/CHANG: TIPSY POINT | Choreography by: Kyli Kleven, Steven May, Ching I-Chang, Kuan-Yu Chen, Carly Berrett, Tzu-Ying Lee.
Dancers: Nancy Andrews, Myles de Bastion, Lauren Bruker, Ching-I Chang, Kuan-Yu Chen, Kevin Ho, Kyli Kleven, Tzu-Ying Lee, Yeong Wen Lee, Hsin-Yu Liao, Steve May, Tim O'Donnell, Nicholas Wagner.
Dance film: Carly Berrett.
| | SCHEDULE | Center for Performance Research
May 15, 2010
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Kuan-Yu Chen (of Chen/Chang) floated some of these balloons in her solo Koala Project. To a taped description of herself by herself, she spends the first few minutes blowing balloons from little globs of plastic and setting them free or rubbing them off her hands, depending on how the inflation goes. The narration is whimsical self-portrait but also wishful, with Kuan describing what she may be doing 12 years hence. There is just enough dancing to make it a piece about dance, but in a way, this makes the point that dance is a slice of a dancers' life, something fascinating and fulfilling but ultimately impermanent and transitory.
The duet that Chen and Tzu-Ying Lee danced in silence due to technical difficulty, The Land Between Us, is strong even without the intended music. Lee and Chen dance as two bodies with one mind much of the time, in sync both in movement and mood; they are one of those dance duos that one looks forward to seeing again. Land is wonderfully tender sometimes and plenty physical at other times. Lee gets the choreography credit, but clearly these two create well together.
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| | Photo by Gene Hale | | | Kuan-Yu Chen
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Unfair as it may be, nothing else left an impression that made it to this review.
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AUGUST 9, 2010
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