The striped feather extends straight up from the dancer’s head, nearly doubling her height. As she moves, it moves in response, bending like a reed in the wind, rippling like an eel.
In Chinese opera, pheasant tail feathers, called ling zi and usually worn in pairs, identify a warrior character. The plumes aren’t just decorative; their waving and quivering express mood and emotion.
But in “Birdy,” by the Taiwanese contemporary dance company Hung Dance, the feathers take on more functions. Performers use them like quills, writing on the stage and in the air. Or they turn them into weapons: a whip, a thin blade to slash a throat. Clusters fly like arrows, showering in volleys. Feathers bunch on a head, as if Medusa had straightened the snakes of her hair.
Such extensions of Chinese tradition are the fruit of a search for new forms by Lai Hung-Chung, Hung Dance’s artistic director. “I wanted to find a vocabulary that was Taiwanese but also mine,” he said in an interview, speaking in Mandarin Chinese through a translator. His choreography also draws on the breath and flow of tai chi.
Yet the sources for “Birdy,” which will have its New York premiere at NYU Skirball on July 17-18, aren’t solely Taiwanese. Lai started as a street dancer, and his work incorporates the American-born street style of popping. He said he was also inspired by “the dark and grotesque” vision of the British painter Francis Bacon and Alan Parker’s film “Birdy” (1984), in which Matthew Modine plays a Vietnam War veteran who imagines he is a bird.
In this way, Lai, who founded his company in 2017, joins a line of artists who have tried to blend Chinese culture, contemporary dance and other Western influences. In Taiwan, the most prominent example is Lin Hwai-Min, whose Cloud Gate Dance Theater and East-meets-West choreography, mixing tai chi and Martha Graham, have been celebrated at home and abroad for decades.
Some mainland Chinese artists have followed a similar path, the most famous being Shen Wei, who made his name on the international scene in the 1990s. When “Birdy” is in New York, Shen will be presenting the U. S. premiere of his “MindScape” at the American Dance Festival in Durham, N.C. The next week, from July 22-25, “MindScape” comes to New York in a free outdoor performance as part of Lincoln Center’s Chinese Arts Week and the Dance Encounters series.
That means that in close succession, New York audiences can experience both the signature work of a choreographer who Lin Hwai-Min recently characterized as the next big thing in Taiwanese dance and the latest piece by a renowned predecessor. How do these representatives of different generations grapple with the contradictions and possibilities of Chinese contemporary dance?
In “MindScape,” Shen mingles dancers from his New York company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, with members of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company. Officially formed in 1992, the Guangdong troupe was the hard-won result of an experiment by the American Dance Festival to foster modern dance in China. When it was proposed, some American observers doubted whether such an individualist form could take root in a collectivist society; observers in China expressed suspicion of it as too Western and bourgeois, too free with bodies. But the cross-cultural experiment worked.
Shen, a founding member of the Guangdong company, choreographed its first international hit, “Folding,” in 1999. But then his career rocketed — a year after he was named a MacArthur fellow, he choreographed the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The artist from Hunan Province had become global. “MindScape” is the first work he has made for the company since “Folding.”
To create the piece, Shen moved for a few months to Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, and found himself sweating in the same rooms where he had been a student nearly 40 years ago.
“Full circle is a reductive way to put it, but I think it’s apt,” said Zak Ryan Schlegel, the rehearsal director for Shen’s company. “I don’t speak Mandarin, but it sometimes felt like I did, because there was this way the idea would bleed through the language,” Schlegel added, noting that Shen freely alternated between Mandarin and English while choreographing “MindScape.” “The process really started to reflect this boundless vision that he has.”
“I felt like a teenager again,” Shen said in a phone interview from his Paris home. (He also has a place in New York.) Being in that place brought back memories of the beginning, when he was taking a risk by committing to an untested idea and had no idea how it might turn out.
Since the current Guangdong dancers are the same age that Shen was when he started out, he saw himself in them. “They are also unsure of the future,” he said, “and they are questioning everything, like I did.” But unlike the young Shen, this generation has a role model, proof that a career is possible: him.
Coming up in Taiwan in the 2010s, Hung Dance’s Lai also had a model: Lin Hwai-Min. That didn’t mean progress was smooth. Resources are still limited and difficult to access, Lai said. Facing setbacks and rejections at home, he refocused his efforts on gaining invitations to international festivals and theaters. Only after he started winning awards abroad did opportunities open up for him in Taiwan. “Birdy,” which has become his calling card, had its U.S. debut at the American Dance Festival in 2024.
To give younger choreographers an easier road, Lai recently founded the Stray Birds Dance Platform, which provides more easily attainable support for fledgling artists. Some of his struggles also found expression in “Birdy,” which he called “a kind of self-portrait.”
Several times in the work, a dancer — not always the same one — tries to break free from the group. The group traps the individual, imprisons her, manipulates her body as if she were their puppet. “The struggle for space and freedom is hard and often lonely,” Lai said.
Shen, at a later stage in his career, is more sanguine, and so is “MindScape.” A professional painter as well as a choreographer, he has long incorporated the act of painting into his dance works, having his pigment-daubed performers leave traces on the floor of their swirling motion. “MindScape” continues that multimedia practice with a rainbow of colors, but it also includes poems he has written (and recently published) about the “landscape of the soul.”
“Thinking back on my struggles of the past 30 years, I have been realizing the importance of inner support,” he said. “As you get older, you start to think more philosophically. Ancient Chinese scholars talk about being flexible like bamboo, not accepting but adapting.”
Even for a well-established choreographer, touring with an international company can be tricky. With flexibility in mind, Shen designed “MindScape” in several versions: a full-scale theatrical production, with live music and projections of the dancers seen from above, Busby Berkeley-style; a version with recorded music; and a half-size variant suitable for outdoor spaces, losing the video but keeping the body painting. That last one, the abridged version, is coming to New York.
The world premiere of “MindScape,” though, was at its most spectacular at the Guangzhou Opera House, a grand glass-and-steel structure designed by Zaha Hadid that opened in 2010. When Shen’s company toured Chinese cities last year, it performed only in opera houses. “It’s shocking how popular modern dance is in China now,” he said.
Schlegel, who performed in the debut, recalled contrasting the enthusiasm of the Chinese audience packing the opera house with Shen’s stories of how foreign modern dance was in the country when the Guangdong company started. He recounted how at the end of the “MindScape” premiere, Shen cut up the painting his dancers had made and distributed the pieces to viewers.
“It felt like some barrier had dissolved,” he said.
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