Donna Uchizono’s Wings of Iron will have its world premiere this week at BAC (photo courtesy Donna Uchizono Company)
Who: Donna Uchizono Company
What: World premiere of Wings of Iron
Where: Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space, 450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
When: May 18-21, $25, 7:30
Why: For more than thirty years, Donna Uchizono has been creating innovative dance works that dig deep into the mind and human emotions while exploring the limits of our physical body. In such pieces as State of Heads, Thin Air, longing two, and Out of Frame, Uchizono, who was born on a US Army base in Tokyo and is proudly “the first and only American-born choreographer of Asian ancestry in the history of modern dance,” has developed a unique movement language that is as unpredictable as it is thrilling.
Her latest evening-length piece, Wings of Iron, has been in the works since 2017 and was originally scheduled to premiere at Baryshnikov Arts Center in May 2020 but was delayed because of the pandemic. A copresentation with the Chocolate Factory, Wings of Iron will now have its world premiere May 18-21 at BAC’s Howard Gilman Performance Space. “Listening is a key to my creative practice,” Uchizono said in a statement. “My creative research takes two to four years to develop a new work with its own physical vocabulary and structure. Dedicated to charting new territory with each dance, my process involves ‘hearing’ the work. I shape conceptual ideas into a physical language specific to each piece, carefully ‘listening’ as the dialogue with the dance itself is revealed. As that dialogue unfolds, a new dance vocabulary emerges that has the imprint of my own history while remaining highly specific to the work itself. My work demands a physical and mental rigor and I am drawn to a redefined sense of ‘virtuosity’ that extends the markers of skill and excellence to push against human standards of patience, duration, and minute, intensely detailed movement. My embrace of unseen undercurrents leads to the unexpected that traverses a spectrum of the discovery of the extraordinary in the vulnerable human experience.”
Wings of Iron will be performed by Bria Bacon, Natalie Green, Molly Lieber, and Pareena Lim, with an original score by okkyung lee and lighting by Joe Levasseur. The visual design features chairs and giant portraits of the dancers. “It is with worried excitement, hopeful relief, and a tinge of cautiousness that we announce the world premiere,” Uchizono wrote in an email blast. Wings of Iron “examines what it takes to remain humane in these charged times, providing a forum for both performer and audience to share in the weight of a vulnerability that is simultaneously public and private.”