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PRESS RELEASE
3 May 2004
Contact: Brian Gaston
Office: 401 863-2730
Box Office (401) 863-2838
Fax (401) 863-7529
www.brown.edu/tickets/yinmei.htm

Artist-in-Residence Yin Mei

Guest Artist's Work Garners Guggenheim Fellowship

"NOMAD: THE RIVER" a modern dance-theatre work in progress, has just garnered its creator Yin Mei (Lawton Wehle Fitt artist in Residence at Brown University) the affections of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. (see: http://www.gf.org/) "Nomad: The River" is the second piece in Yin Mei's epic trilogy entitled The Nomad Project. "Nomad: The River" is presented this piece this week as part of the Brown Dance Ensemble's Spring Concert.

" Stuart Theatre, 77 Waterman Street, Providence, RI
" May 6-9, 2004 at 8pm, plus 3pm matinee May 9, 2004
" Tickets: ($10 Seniors, Faculty and Staff, $5 Students)
" Call Brown Box-office at 401-863-2838, Tues-Fri 12-5pm

ABOUT YIN MEI:

More images and info found on Yin Mei's Web Site

YIN MEI was born in China and started her professional career in traditional Chinese dance during the Cultural Revolution. Before coming to the United States in 1985 to study modern dance on a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, she was a member of a leading Chinese dance company, and later a principal dancer with the Hong Kong Dance Company, where she danced numerous leading roles in the traditional Chinese dance repertoire. Yin Mei now choreographs and performs her contemporary work worldwide through her company, YIN MEI DANCE, having forged a dance style employing Chinese energy direction and spatial principles as a means of creating dance within the rubric of avant garde dance theater. Describing one of Yin Mei's early solo works as a "tour de force for the choreographer-performer," dance critic Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times has written that Yin Mei's contemporary work retains "the stark refinement and distillation of some forms of traditional Eastern dance."

YIN MEI's most recent major work, /Asunder, a multi-media, cross-cultural dance theater work created in collaboration with installation artist Cai Guo-Qiang and composer Robert Een, premiered at Danspace Project in New York in May 2001 and toured eleven U.S. cities in 2002 - starting at the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival - to critical and audience acclaim. Writing in The New York Times, Jennifer Dunning praised the work's "strong, quietly theatrical" imagery. Calling the work "riveting," Dance Insider found it "filled with movement that translates an agony that is repeatedly saved with an embrace" and called Yin Mei "a stunning presence… , bringing her classical Chinese dance training and aesthetic into a blend with her adopted Downtown sensibilities with refined grace."

In December 2002, Yin Mei presented a work-in-progress version of a portion of her next major work, Nomad:The River, in collaboration with computer animation artist Tennessee Dixon, at Danspace Project at St. Marks Church. The New York Times termed the work "theatrical magic." Nomad: The River is part of a planned multi-cultural, multi-media dance theater project in several parts entitled The Nomad Project. Nomad: The River will premiere at Dance Theater Workshop in New York in early 2005 and tour thereafter. In April 2002, Yin Mei performed Nomad: Tea, an earlier section of this work, at the Asia Society, in collaboration with visual artist Wenda Gu (as part of a major exhibition of contemporary Asian art). In March 2001, Yin Mei was a featured performer at the Gala Benefit for Danspace Project honoring Sam Miller (along with Ralph Lemon and White Oak Dance Project).

YIN MEI's evening-length dance theater work entitled, "Empty Tradition/City of Peonies," premiered at the Asia Society in New York City in fall 1998 and was presented at the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival in August 1999. Conceived, choreographed and directed by Yin Mei, Empty Tradition/City of Peonies was the product of a year-long collaboration with noted Indonesian composer Tony Prabowo and prominent Chinese installation artist Xu Bing. In her New York Times review, Ms. Dunning wrote that Empty Tradition/City of Peonies is a "richly layered" work of "stunning clarity" that creates a "territory of dreams and memory." "The piece proceeds from one distilled memory to another, not illustrating them but evoking their emotions in passages of shimmering, pensive and abrupt movement." Ms. Dunning calls Yin Mei "a dancer of exquisite lyricism and delicacy." Deborah Jowitt, writing in the Village Voice, summed up Empty Tradition/City of Peonies as "exquisite," saying that "[i]ntense images emerge from mist - the tremulous space in which dreams and memories sprout." In addition to Yin Mei, the performers included two dancers (one from Tibet, one from the U.S.), a Buddhist martial artist, seven Indonesian musicians and a Canadian-born Julliard-trained violist.

YIN MEI'S choreography has been presented at such New York venues as Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, DTW, La Mama ETC., the Asia Society, the Japan Society, PACE Downtown Theater, the Mulberry Street Theater, Lincoln Center Out-Of-Doors Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Queens College Theater, P.S. 1 and the Knitting Factory. Her work has been presented twice at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, and also at U.S. venues including Columbia College Dance Center (Chicago), UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Kohler Arts Center (Wisconsin), the University of Arizona, State University of Arizona, Hamilton College, the University of Alaska and Bard College. YIN MEI's choreography has been presented internationally at Tokyo's Theater X, the Hong Kong Town Hall Theatre and the Jerusalem Museum, and at numerous international dance festivals, including the Chikamatsu Festival (Nagato, Japan), the BBB Festival (Potsdam, Germany), the Indonesian Dance Festival (Jakarta), the Korea International Dance Festival (Seoul) and the Contemporary Dance Festival of West Sumatra. She was one of ten international choreographers invited to participate in the 50th anniversary of the American Dance Festival.

YIN MEI was honored with a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2004. She was also a nominee for a Cal Arts Fellowship in Choreography in 2003 and received the Choreography Award given annually by the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002. Yin Mei's work has been funded by major grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Fund (twice), the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts (twice), the Jerome Foundation, the Meet The Composer/International Creative Collaborations/Program in partnership with the Ford Foundation, Arts International, the Greenwall Foundation (twice), the Jerome Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts (twice), the New York State Dance Force, the Asian Cultural Council and the Research Foundation of the City University of New York. Yin Mei was the recipient of a Contemplative Practice Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1999.

YIN MEI joined the faculty of Queens College (CUNY) in 1992, where she teaches dance based on principles developed from her training in Tai Chi and Asian performance. She has taught workshops and seminars worldwide and has been a guest instructor and artist-in-residence at Bard College, the Indonesian Institute of Arts, Columbia College at Chicago, the University of Alaska, UMASS, University of California at Santa Cruz, Kohler Arts Center (Wisconsin), University of Arizona, State University of Arizona, Hamilton College and the Beijing Dance Academy. She has twice been the recipient of the Queens College Presidential Research Award for her choreographic work and has twice received a Queens College Foundation Innovative Teaching Award.

YIN MEI received her B.A. with honors from the Gallatin School at New York University and her M.F.A. in Theatre Dance from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She has also had coursework toward a Ph.D. at NYU's Dance and Dance Education Department.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

"NOMAD: THE RIVER"

Yin Mei Dance seeks funding to support the creation of Nomad: The River, a new dance theater work inspired by the overarching theme of spiritual wandering. This evening length work - the second in a planned trilogy entitled The Nomad Project - will have its world premiere at Dance Theater Workshop in New York in Winter/Spring 2005 and tour thereafter. The first work in the trilogy - Nomad: Tea - was presented at the Asia Society in Spring 2002.

Nomad: The River is inspired by the choreographer's own search for spiritual meaning - a search which began in a childhood clouded by China's Cultural Revolution, but blessed by dreams of a world beyond. For this multi-cultural, multi-media work, Yin Mei collaborates with computer animation artist Tennessee Rice Dixon, lighting designer Shao Lia and costume designer Naoko Nagata. The work will be performed by seven dancers and will be set to music taken from a variety of recorded sources, including work by composer Phillip Glass, recent electronica-influenced songs by the group Radiohead and music from the Cultural Revolution era in China.

Thematically, Nomad: The River revolves around the symbol of the river, drawing its context from two actual rivers - the Yellow River in China and the Ganges in India. The Yellow River is known both as the mother of Chinese civilization, and as "China's Sorrow," due to the tremendous floods which periodically overcome its borders. The river is, for the Chinese, a locus of ghosts and ghost stories, of mythical happenings, of destruction, of disasters, of transformation. Likewise, for the Indian people, the Ganges is a holy and inviolate body of water - a river from which they drink, on which they cremate their dead in floating pyres, in which they ritually bathe - despite its being one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth.

The duality represented by these two fabled rivers - both the sacred and the profane - drives the choreography and visual environment for Nomad: The River. The work begins when a young woman walks onto the stage, turns on an old-fashioned radio and stares, transfixed, into its lighted dial. As the music pours forth, Tennessee Dixon's animated projections open up a magical realm of memories, fantasies and transformation. The theater space becomes a world beyond and the stage morphs into a river along which a ghostly boat carries the dancers on their journey. Yet periodically they step from the boat to face a different reality. Life is beyond our control - it startles and overwhelms; turmoil, chaos even, interrupts and disorients the seekers. As if drowning, or drunk, the dancers reel in and out of sync; coming together, falling apart, spinning out of control around a strange schoolyard Maypole, reinventing themselves by donning Balinese masks, bathing finally in a cloud of green tea dust. The focus of the work thus continually shifts between the impassioned longing to escape the bounds of the world, and the courage we need to face the rawness and danger of the here-and-now in which we must, inevitably, find our way.

Project Timeline: The initial research/development phase for this work has already begun and Yin Mei will continue to develop the conceptual aspects of the work through 2004. The choreography will be developed on dance students during multi-week residencies at universities, including Queens College, Arizona State University and Brown University. The primary partner is the Brown University Dance Department, which has invited Yin Mei to create and stage a work-in-progress version on its dance students. This residency is taking place during Spring 2004. Also, during this time, Tennessee Dixon will complete the computer projections in collaboration with Yin Mei. Each of the creative residencies gives Yin Mei and her collaborators the time, bodies and resources they need to hone the themes and structure of the work before moving into the rehearsal phase with the cast. These rehearsals will begin in fall 2004, with two work-in-progress showings planned for late 2004/early 2005 in New York (and/or possibly at a residency). The costume and lighting collaborators will complete their work at this time. DTW has committed to presenting the world premiere of Nomad: The River during its winter/spring 2005 season. About Yin Mei Dance. With the twin successes of Empty Tradition/City of Peonies (presented at the Asia Society in 1998 and the Jacobs Pillow Dance
Festival in August 1999) and /Asunder (which toured 11 U.S. cities in 2002), Yin Mei has established herself as a choreographer uniquely positioned to explore themes of artistic and spiritual significance arising at the intersection between Asian traditional performance and Western avant garde dance theater. Critics and audiences alike have spoken of the "meditative," "dream-like" atmosphere
her work evokes - the sense of being taken out of one's usual context through a visceral connection between performer and audience. In creating these da nce theater works, Yin Mei has always relied on a multi-disciplinary approach, collaborating with a remarkable group of visual artists and composers, including installation artists Xu Bing (Empty Tradition) and Cai Guo-Xiang (/Asunder), composers Robert Een (/Asunder) and Tony Prabowo (Empty Tradition) and noted downtown dance costume designer Naoko Nagata (The Nomad Project). Here, in addition to Ms. Nagata, Yin Mei will work with Ms. Dixon, who will use computer-generated images "performed" live, and lighting designer Shao Lia, China's leading contemporary lighting designer who recently completed an MFA under the tutelage of Jennifer Tipton at Yale. More extensive biographies of the principal collaborators are attached. In addition, Yin Mei has for the past few years worked closely with MAPP in developing and touring her work. MAPP will assist throughout the creation, production and touring of Nomad: The River.