Making its Chicago debut, Beijing Dance Theater offers proof positive that good dancing doesn’t necessarily mean good dance.
Chinese dancers are famously trained, and the 16 performers of “Wild Grass” often moved beautifully. At times artistic director and choreographer Wang Yuanyuan achieves striking individual images, compositions that take your breath away. Yet those moments in “Wild Grass,” at the Harris Theater, don’t often cohere or evolve.
This ambitious piece is divided into three very different “movements,” their attractive stage pictures (design by Han Jiang) determined by passages from celebrated Chinese poet Lu Xun, who died in 1936. Included in the program, these passages — more mysterious than illuminating, at least to a Westerner — provide no clues to Wang’s intention.
But the sections seem to proceed, in a kind of dialectic, from an archaic vision of China to a degraded view of the West to an uneasy world between here and there, between sky and land.
“Dead Fire” has a backdrop of snow-capped mountains and full moon; mountain mists sometimes envelop the dancers, most in white. One performer in purplish red, perhaps representing the last ember, is defiant yet weak. In Su Cong’s alternately flat and melodramatic piano composition, one section sounds as if it’s introducing the villain. The repetitive, anguished flinging of the choreography is equally melodramatic.
With the help of techno-inflected electronic music from Norway’s Biosphere and France’s Kangding Ray, “Farewell, Shadows” places the action in an anomic nightclub. The women, on pointe, wear black bandeau tops and very brief briefs. Wang’s ingenious choreography adopts harsh fashion-model angles; legs and torsos jut from or ripple around razor-sharp feet. The men dominate and manipulate the women, who eye the audience seductively.
“Dance of Extremity” provides greater subtlety and resonance, suggesting a dysfunctional society of oppressors and prisoners, of conflict and brutality.
If you’re getting the impression “Wild Grass” is unremittingly bleak, you’d be right. Dissonant music throughout underscores the unrelieved darkness. In the closing movement, Wang Peng’s string composition is as ear-piercing as Bernard Herrmann’s in the shower scene of Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” But it goes on much longer. Headache. Ow.
Like the music, which continually suggests high drama never anchored or elaborated, moment by moment the dancing evokes suffering and discord. We don’t know why. Women get dragged around, literally, a lot.
Toward the end, I realized I was waiting for the dancing to gain some musical momentum. But even when the score momentarily quickened, or a duet section promised greater interest, or the wonderful Gao Jing appeared, hair flying, that didn’t happen. Or not for long.
More Top Picks Best Wraparound Sunglasses For Migraines
‘Wild Grass’ by Beijing Dance Theater
2.5 STARS
When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday
Where: Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph St. at Millennium Park
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes
Tickets: $10-$65 at 773-334-7777 or harristheaterchicago.org