nothin Yang Hao Dances The In-Between | New Haven Independent

Yang Hao Dances The In-Between

Judy Rosenthal Photo

A still from Pied à terre.

Just six or seven minutes into Pied à terre, dancer Yang Hao did something that the audience, bracing for a kinetic performance, may not have expected: He lay down. Prone, pressed right up against the floor as if totally exhausted. As if his body brought with it an immeasurable weight. The room fell into total silence. Everything up to this point had focused in on minute, measured but powerful gestures: the flick and flutter of fingers, clean snapping of wrists, arch of his back against his rolled shoulders. Was this an early admission of defeat, or something else?

Audience members didn’t need to wait long to find the answer. After a few pregnant moments, Hao snapped into an action that would define the rest of the dance: a violent, calculated grace. Under its spell, he jerked and bended to his feet, and then assumed the role of guide, exploring with the audience what it means to live — and move — in and through liminal social spaces. 

Half-dancer, half-performance artist, and fully of a current global moment, Yang Hao graced the intimate Whitney Theater Wednesday night with the world premiere of back-to-back solo pieces, Pied à terre and Middle, on which he began to work last year on a Yale-China Association Arts Fellowship. A second show and post-performance talkback is planned for Wednesday night at 8 p.m.

Judy Rosenthal Photo

A still from Pied à terre.

That Hao begins Pied à terre — itself tied in title to the terminology of home, and home away from home — by drawing, and getting into a box, and ends its pendant piece unbounded at center stage, is perhaps a metaphor for where this young and promising artist finds himself right now. Despite the first work’s tie to the Yale-China Association Arts Fellowship, of which Hao was in the inaugural class, Pied à terre is much more interested in exploring the nebulous space between male and female, cis-identified and other, than East and West. Moving to sound design by Christopher Ross-Ewart (who stunned in the Yale Cabaret’s Satellite Festival earlier this year), excerpts of a script by Alice Renzy and Jessica Rizzo, and voiceover narration by Elizabeth Stahlmann, Hao’s navigation of these murky and debated waters is not just poignant and timely, but funny, wildly creative, and deeply emotional; he’s left few contemporary stones unturned, references undone, fetishes unmentioned or left out of sight. 

But Hao has also dedicated a great deal of thought — and movement, particularly in Middle, for which he learned kung-fu with masters Lam Chuen Ho and Jesse Gooding — to cross-continental discourse. The work doubles as an eye-opening and sharply focused lens onto a world of Chinese contemporary dance and its influences. Where Pied à terre leaves the audience laughing themselves straight into bouts of stunned silence and raucous applause, Middle brings them into a debate about how Hao — and they, as his willing if silent partners — might ever hope to understand, then break, what binds the colonizer to the colonized. How he, perhaps, may be able to get history to lurch forward as his body does, facing ahead with a nod to the past.

I really appreciate this opportunity,” he said after the first performance. I hope it’s the beginning of an opportunity to create more art here.”

Yang Hao: Pied à terre and Middle runs tonight, June 22, at 8 p.m. the Whitney Theater on 53 Wall St. It will be followed by a discussion led by Emily Coates, director of the dance studies curriculum at Yale College. For ticket information, visit the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’ website.

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