Even if life is unbearable, you must maintain three minutes of dignity in the dance

Suspension

◎ Anna Cao

2021 marks the 10th anniversary of Hou Ying's Dance Theatre and the 11th year that Hou Ying has officially moved back to Beijing from New York to do modern dance creation. In the past 10 years, Hou Ying and her modern dance have continued to move towards the public, merging with other forms of contemporary art such as architectural design, painting and sculpture.

Originally, Hou Ying planned to do a vigorous commemorative event: to re-rehearse all the important works she had created in the past 10 years. However, the dance remake is not a film re-screening, and it faces huge cost pressure. In the end, she chose to rearrange the two works "Levitation" and "Alien", and performed them at the 77 Theater on May 15 and 16, 2021. Compared with "Alien", "Levitation" is more classic in dance movement techniques, and the whole work is only 20 minutes, small and beautiful.

There are only two dancers in "Levitation", Huang Jianrong and Cong Xinyu, who stood up and danced on the stage for less than a minute from beginning to end, and the rest of the time almost always danced on the floor. Their bodies trembled and swirled, like the wings of two butterflies that fell on top of the flowers. The arc of each movement of the dancer is very slight, and it is connected end to end, and one step cannot be wrong. After the hand movement must return to the original position, and then move the foot, the foot movement, but also to return to the original place, and then move the body, in short, any part of the body after the movement, must be reset. And this reset will be the starting point for the next dance move. This is the subtlety of "Levitation", which is the subtlety of "Levitation", like two slowly surging whirlpools, they skillfully touch each other through the inertia of rotational motion, and then push each other away because of the action of force. Oval lights envelop the bodies of the two dancers, like two twins playing in the womb of the mother. I may have made a mistake in using "they", the two dancers looked more like genderless people, but their movements were extremely feminine.

Hou Ying created "Levitation" in 2009, which premiered at the Tish Theater of New York University in the United States. The opportunity to create this work was due to her years of physical strain in dance sports, serious injuries, and had to withdraw from the stage. But for the dancer not to dance, she did not know what else to do, so she and another dancer lay on the basketball court of New York University to create, because she could not stand up at all, so she had the work "Levitation", which moved on the floor. In just 20 minutes, it is the most difficult dance movement technique in Hou Ying's works so far, and it has only been repeated less than 10 times since its premiere, because it is difficult to find suitable female dancers. It's not that no one challenges this difficulty, but after the jump, it is basically impossible not to be injured. During this re-rehearsal, Huang Jianrong and Cong Xinyu were already scarred. Originally created in the healing stage, "Suspension" created another kind of "injury" of the body, which is unbelievable. However, the two dancers in the pain of the body again and again phoenix nirvana, trembling, spinning, spinning, trembling, they are not perfect, even sometimes with childishness, clumsiness, but maintain rationality and spirituality.

Levitation, which looks more like a rational science fiction work, declares that every life is a painful journey from the beginning of conception. I have always believed that good dance is a dance that needs no words to supplement, no need for dazzling movements to be sensational, just a form of body language, and its special feature lies in the fact that the writing instrument itself (i.e., the body) and the work itself are one, which is unique in other art forms. There is no such thing as dancing without the body, and the mystery of the human body is no less than that of the human brain, which indirectly explains the charm of dance. "Suspension" seems so simple, the action is so subtle, even you will feel that each action is no difference, but in fact, no two actions are the same, and the interlocking has produced a huge difference, just like the butterfly effect.

Hou Ying said after the performance of "Suspension", "Even if there are so many unbearable things in life, I must maintain three minutes of dignity in the dance." "For many people, art is coffee, clothes, flowers and the sea, but for Hou Ying, the ultimate of art has a temple, that is, hemingway regrettably did not reach the top in "The Snow of Kilimanjaro".

Photo courtesy of Hou Ying Dance Theatre