Cloud Gate Dance Theatre returns to BAM with WATER STAINS ON THE WALL (photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)
BAM Next Wave Festival
Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 12-15, $16-$50, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.cloudgate.org
Since 1973, company founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min and the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre have been presenting elegant, exquisitely choreographed shows centered around meditative movement inspired by Taoist and Buddhist philosophy and ancient culture, incorporating traditional, contemporary, and classical dance in mesmerizing ways. The company has been appearing at BAM’s Next Wave Festival since 1995, in such elegant productions as Moon Water and Wild Cursive. This week they’re back in Brooklyn with the international premiere of Water Stains on the Wall, a seventy-minute multimedia work that explores Chinese calligraphy, with music by Toshio Hosokawa, lighting design by Lulu W. L. Lee, projections by Ethan Wang, costumes by Lin Ching-ju, and set design and choreography by Lin. Lin will also give an Iconic Artist Talk on Thursday night at BAM Rose Cinemas at 6:00 ($20), moderated by Rachel Cooper, as part of BAM’s 150th anniversary celebration.
Dancers appear to float on clouds in WATER STAINS ON THE WALL (photo by Liu Chen-hsiang)
Update: On a slightly tilted white stage resembling Japanese rice paper, sixteen dancers slowly move about, sometimes in unison, sometimes individually, as black and gray inky, shadowy splotches drift across the floor like clouds. All of the dancers but one exit, leaving Su I-Ping to perform a brief solo, soon joined by Yang I-Chun. Through a prologue and seven sections over the course of seventy minutes, dancers slowly come and go, at times breaking out into smooth, fluid movements, waving their arms, lifting their legs, almost as if they are calligraphic letters come to life. Identically garbed in diaphanous, translucent, floor-length billowing pants and either bare-chested (seven men) or in flesh-colored leotards (nine women), the performers never once come into contact with one another, each a single, individual part of the whole, floating on the formations below them — which often evoke memory and the past as much as clouds — as Toshio Hosokawa’s compelling score shifts from electronic noise to minimalist percussion and piano. The Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Water Stains on the Wall, inspired by a legendary Tang Dynasty tale about calligraphy, is another breathtaking presentation from one of that country’s most popular companies, which has been bringing their mesmerizing works to BAM’s Next Wave Festival since 1995. “Brooklyn in late autumn can be freezing and wet, especially in comparison to Taipei,” company founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min explains in a program note, “but to all of us in Cloud Gate — BAM is a center of warmth.”
Makoto Shinkai, who took the anime world by storm with his 2003 hit Voices of a Distant Star, a short film made completely on his home computer, followed that up with his first feature-length work, the magical and mystical The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Set in an alternate futuristic post-WWII world, The Place Promised centers on three friends, Hiroki, Takuya, and Sayuri, who make a vow to fly Hiroke and Takuya’s plane, Bela C’ielo, into the Tower, a monolithic structure rising into the sky that symbolizes the postwar division into the Union and U.S.-Japanese forces. With war imminent, an older Takuya and Hiroki find themselves on opposing sides, with Sayuri lost in a coma dreamworld. Although the plot — especially the science aspects — gets rather complex and confusing, The Place Promised is a beautiful-looking film, both tenderly sweet and harshly depressing, presenting a rather bleak forecast of the future. But stunning visual moments such as a setting sun with an illuminated halo that forms a shining star twinkling into an abandoned factory make it all worth it. Shinkai’s film was deservedly named Best Animated Film at the Mainichi Film Awards, where it topped the much more heralded Steamboy (Katsuhiro Otomo, 2004) and Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki, 2004). The career of the thirty-eight-year-old anime auteur is being celebrated at this year’s New York Comic Con / New York Anime Festival, which will include screenings of Voices of a Distant Star (October 14, Room 1A18, 12:30), The Place Promised in Our Early Days (October 14, Room 1A18, 1:15), the three-part 5 Centimeters Per Second (October 14, Room 1A18, 3:00), and his latest, Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below (October 16, IGN Theater, 11:00 am), with Shinkai on hand to introduce this New York premiere.
Azazel Jacobs follows up the widely praised Momma’s Man, in which he cast his real-life parents (experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and painter Flo Jacobs) in a story about a married adult and new father (Matt Boren) who keeps extending a visi t to his ancestral home, with another idiosyncratic tale about growing up. Terri, adapted by Patrick deWitt from a series of his interrelated short stories, follows the trials and tribulations of the title teen, played with great subtlety by newcomer Jacob Wysocki. Terri is a grossly overweight kid who shows up late to school every morning wearing pajamas; lives with and takes care of his uncle (The Office’s Creed Bratton), who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s; becomes obsessed with catching mice; and has a secret crush on high school cutie Heather (Olivia Crocicchia). When the vice principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (a wonderfully offbeat John C. Reilly), takes a personal interest in him, Terri is at first confused, but then seems okay with it, until he finds out that he is part of a group of deeply troubled teens that Mr. Fitzgerald meets with regularly, including such loser outcasts as Chad Markson (Bridger Zadina), who likes to pull out his own hair and say very inappropriate things at inopportune moments. They are soon joined by Heather, who was nearly expelled for allowing a boy to touch her during class and is now shunned by the cool clique. The unlikely threesome, along with Mr. Fitzgerald, who appears to mean well but can’t stop putting his foot in his mouth, exemplify the difficult teenage years as they come together, and break apart, over the course of this charming, eclectic film. As with Momma’s Man, Jacobs has faith in his narrative, eschewing grand statements and teen clichés in favor of a poignant and intelligent examination of adolescence that anyone can relate to, whether they were the teased or the teaser back in those tumultuous and torturous high school days. Terri is screening on October 13 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “After Hours (Fall/Winter 2011)” series, which continues October 27 with Joe Maggio’s The Last Rites of Joe May, followed by a Pinewood Dialogue with star Dennis Farina, and November 3 with Larry Cohen’s 1977 film The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover, with Cohen in person.
