Mats Rudels
A mostly dark image with the light focused on a dancer to the right of the image.
Kaori Kenmotsu behind a scrim reaches upward while bathed in light.
Thursday’s night performance of the UW-Madison dance concert Dirty Laundry was a ferment of creative collaboration among Li Chiao-Ping, the dancers, composer Byron Au Yong and video artist Hong Huo. In the foreground was the always- inventive dance; in the background, videos and still photos were projected, accompanied by a layering of recorded voice-over narration and music and sound collages. Sometimes the narration was drowned out by the loud music and sound, but overall the sound design was essential in creating continuity across an eclectic series of personal stories, organized around the theme who am I, and, do I belong?
In the dance I Was Floating, Elisabeth Roskopf tells the story of how she wishes she could know why her Korean birth parents gave her up for adoption to an American family, and what it is to live as a Korean. She floats on one leg, the other stretched before her parallel to the ground, and the music floats, rootless, a character in her story. Li Chiao-Ping and her dancers tell stories through dance, sound and images, of Asian Americans seeking acceptance despite prejudice.
Laundry also provides a thread tying the stories together. Li Chiao-Ping tells of growing up working in her family’s Chong Wo Laundry in San Francisco. In several dances, dancers unroll sheets and catch projected images on them, fold sheets, pin up clothes, take clothes off, scatter laundry across the stage and even dance on laundry.
Li Chiao-Ping presides in a back corner in the dance About Laundry and Like Bamboo. She’s like a mother or a laundry goddess personifying laundry, whose swaying attendants, on their backs, lift up their bare feet to her. In the foreground two dancers fold laundry or become laundry that is folded as we listen to an explanation of how work is done in a laundry, set to the gurgling of washers and dryers through the music of Byron Au Yong.
Constrained at first within a cylinder of scrim, Kaori Kenmotsu, in I Am My Mother’s Mother, and in Expectations, tells of burdens passed down mother to daughter, although she rebels, saying that she does not want to pass the burden of expectations on to her daughter. Her daughter, though, lives in a culture that foists stereotypic Asian minority expectations on young women, as indicated by the words of Asian stereotypes projected on the back wall.
Gelline Guevarra cries out “I am hungry!” and rubs her belly in Filling the Void. Her family came from the Philippines to California, where she and her older sister attended a Christian school. They were the only Asian children, and in the dance she realizes with anger that they were targeted by insults that were “supposed to be” funny.
The concert closes with dances of reconciliation, healing and the power of community. Kenmotsu and Mayu Nakaya lean on each other in a dance of friendship, the narration telling of their discovery of each other’s roots in Japan, one in Okinawa, the other in northern Japan. Then Nakaya notes in Only Bones her mother’s wise saying that stripped of skin, people are bones and our bones cannot be distinguished according to illusions of race.
The grand finale is a reworking of the dance Earth. The dancers create mesmerizing patterns in groups that expand and expand and expand until everyone, Li Chiao-Ping and all the other dancers, are onstage moving to the healing community of the choreography.
Throughout the evening the dancers radiate strength, uncoiling from the ground in this Wisconsin winter like the plants in the Bolz Conservatory, and were just as endlessly warm and varied. They danced with precision. One example of a thousand: laundry mother Li Chiao-Ping raised her arms in a V and a dancer in the foreground, upside-down with legs in the air mirrored the V with her legs. A victorious evening!
Dirty Laundry will be performed in the H’Doubler Performance Space in Lathrop Hall, 1050 University Avenue, Feb. 7 at 8 p.m. and Feb. 8 at 2:30 p.m.
