This combination of choreographers gave the audience a good look at post-modern performance from multiple perspectives. Among the evening's eight pieces, four were gems.
"Becoming" (2009), a short solo Li choreographed herself, was dedicated to her mentor, modern dancer Daniel Nagrin, who died late last year. Like Nagrin, Li's a potent performer. She wielded her steely technique in literal service to the theme, turning herself into a creature punching its way out of an egg and learning to move.
Like Li's 1995 combat boots ballet "Gó," her "La Bote," a premiere, was droll. In this solo former company member Megan Thompson, a solid mover, interacted with a mysterious silver box she'd set on the floor. She circled it, ignored it, then managed to stand on its tiny top and turn like a music box ballerina.
Rosenberg's "Hallelujah," also a premiere, featured Li Chiao-Ping Dance member and art department MFA candidate Anneliese Charek in an utterly evocative panic attack. She clutched at body parts, tapping a heartbeat into a microphone. She gesticulated, contracting and hyper-extending, standing in a circle of lights. There wasn't much movement through space, but the choreography went way beyond performance art. "Hallelujah"'s the danciest, least multi-media piece I've seen from Rosenberg; he works well in this mode.
Fellow Travelers' disconcerting performance piece, "109th Bead," also a premiere, was created by the company's artistic director Cynthia Adams with videography by Rosenberg. In a deconstructed exposé of the grueling process behing child adoption, Adams, onstage and on screen, projected a many-angled kaleidoscope of angst.
From the rest of the works, the Dada-esque "Lunar Ellipses," in which Li's company and her troupe of senior community dancers pursued the absurd beneath a projected crescent moon, stood out. I was less impressed with "unmoored," choreographed by Adams for Li Chiao-Ping Dance. Nothing in this girl gestalt piece, with segments dedicated to lipstick and a spat on a Mexican vacation, matched philosophical silliness of "La Bote," the depth of "109th Bead" or Li's amazon strength in "Becoming."
Li's "Disaster Practice," set on UW Dance Program students, looked much as it did in its H'Doubler Performance Space premiere in 2002. Behind a curtain of yellow "caution" tape, dancers recited a busy litany of advice -- always wear clean underwear, don't play with matches -- while executing the runs, rollovers, handstands and cartwheels essential to Li's vocabulary.
Li's "Running With Scissors," choreographed last year, was similarly hectic. Li Chiao-Ping Dance's six dancers engaged in relentlessly shifting chains of leaps, jumps, runs and rollovers. It takes strength and skill to dance a long, uptempo piece. "Running" was an ample showcase of Li's technique, but my notes say, "Where's the meat?"
