MUNA TSENG DANCE PROJECTS
Tseng is an American of Chinese descent who was born in Hong Kong and lived there until she was 13, when her family moved to Canada. She danced with choreographer Jean Erdman, the wife of mythologist Joseph Campbell, for seven years, and has been showing her own work in New York for the last ten. Though her technical training has been exclusively Western, she has always, as she said in an interview, “drawn unconsciously from the Asian part of my psyche.” Certainly the three dances she and her group performed at the Dance Center last weekend looked Asian to me, though in a modern-dance idiom, with the same calm, unemotional, and almost impenetrable surface of a Chinese landscape. But it may be that Tseng’s works are somewhat inaccessible simply because her imagery is so personal and her manner of performance so self-involved.
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In Spirit Ruins, a premiere, two women (Tseng and singer/dancer Victoria Boomsma) come together and part via small feminine rituals. First Boomsma, then Tseng opens a small red box, blows powder off a puff, and dusts her neck, cheeks, and arms. (It’s a sign of the delicacy and subtlety of the dancing that, unlike Boomsma, Tseng powders her cheek warily, as if the puff might burn her.) While Tseng powders, Boomsma stands in an upstage corner uttering small noises–the little moans and hums and clicks we might make when we’re by ourselves–to accompany the recorded music (by Ari Frankel). Then Tseng begins to move about the stage in circular, fluid, rather monotonic choreography that’s exquisitely performed but otherwise unremarkable.
The final work on this program, Water Mysteries, took shape over a four-year period, and its loose, associative structure may be the result of that long evolution. Bruce Tovsky’s music ties the different sections together; its natural sounds–whirring insects, running water, rain, and thunder–are appropriate to the dance but come perilously close to cliche. Some of the visual effects are stunning, however, particularly the way candles are placed near glass blocks to create rippling, wavelike shadows on the dancers hovering over them.
The duet in Water Mysteries made me particularly uncomfortable. It’s essentially a ritual hair washing: Chin’s and Lee’s long hair, worn loose, is first tossed here and there in teasing clouds around their heads, then combed with their hands, dunked in tubs of water, flung in great arcs to create pattering rainstorms, dragged like mops in wet streams across the floor. Kneeling and bending to immerse their heads, the women reveal the napes of their necks–the epitome of faceless, helpless souls, ready for the guillotine or whatever else comes next. I think the source of these images is male fantasies about women’s passivity and vulnerability, male voyeuristic thrills at seeing women undress, powder themselves, or wash their hair, (maybe) believing themselves unseen. Though Tseng is a talented dancer and creates stage pictures that are often beautiful, she seems stuck in cultural attitudes and images defined by men.
