10th CrossCurrent Dance Festival
Company:
Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company X Flushing Town Hall
Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company announces its participation in the 10th CrossCurrent Dance Festival, in collaboration with Flushing Town Hall, on Friday, May 12, 2023 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $20 and are available online at Flushing Town Hall website: https://flushingtownhall.org/2023-crosscurrent.
2023 is the 10th Anniversary of the CrossCurrent Dance Festival. It will be a year for the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company and Flushing Town Hall to reflect on the years past and pay tribute to the founder of the festival, Nai-Ni Chen. Since its inception, the festival has featured many emerging choreographic talents in the Asian American community. This year, the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company will celebrate its own history of cross-cultural collaboration by featuring the preview of a new work, Between, in progress by Polish master Jacek Luminski, a pioneer of Polish Contemporary Dance, and PeiJu Chien-Pott 簡珮如, the Company’s Director of New and Contemporary Dance. The two began developing the new work in November, 2022. This new dance, currently untitled, will be premiered in Poland’s Lublin Dance Festival in July, 2023, to be presented alongside several of Nai-Ni Chen’s iconic works.
In this CrossCurrent Dance Festival, the Company will also show the following works, as well as another dance by Jacek Luminski.
Ashes of a Dead Frog (2008) - Inspired by a Japanese writer’s recollections of the first encounter of White Europeans and the Japanese, describing the skin of the visitors as the skin of a dead frog. Choreographer Jacek Luminski explores the power dynamics of different types of relationships in our contemporary society in this work. The creation of Ashes of a Dead Frog was supported by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.
Lullaby for My Favorite Insomniac - A signature duet from Nai-Ni Chen’s collaborative work with the world renowned Ahn Trio, Temptation of the Muses. Lullaby for My Favorite Insomniac is a sweet, delicate work that showcases the Nai-Ni Chen mastery in the western contemporary dance form and the depth of the collaborator’s working relationship.
Introspection - Beginning in 2016, Nai-Ni Chen worked with Aljira Contemporary Arts in Newark, NJ on a project where the audience would enter the gallery at night in darkness given a flashlight. Dancers would be doing improvised or choreographed movement in front of the paintings, sculptures or art works, mostly by Black artists. The result of three years of Aljira at Night is Introspection, a work about the many facets of identity, how we view and treat each other, and how we construct our own identity based on other people’s view about us.
Neptune’s Dialog (1993) - One of Nai-Ni Chen’s personal favorite dances, Neptune’s Dialog was created in memory of her childhood. She grew up in Keelung, Taiwan. The beautiful rain harbor is close to one of the island’s most scenic beaches, YehLiu (Wild Willow) Beach/Park in Taiwan. The white sand beach is dotted with a unique geological feature, the world's only remaining mushroom (xun) stone landform. It is a magical place to which she hopes to bring the audience in this work.
About Jacek Luminski
Jacek Luminski is the founding artistic and executive director of the Silesian Dance Theatre in Bytom (Silesia), the premiere contemporary dance company of Poland and an institution dedicated to the development and promotion of dance nationally and internationally. He designed educational and community outreach programs to promote dance and audience development. Supported by the EU, the Silesian Dance Theater cooperated with six European dance schools under Luminski’s guidance, developing the country’s first accredited university dance curriculum. Luminski has received numerous awards for his outstanding achievements in developing a unique style, technique and form of dance theater. He serves as Professor and the Head of the Dance Division at the Academy of Music in Katowice and he holds professorship at the Beijing Dance Academy in China as well. For more than a decade now Luminski has been a main figure behind the institutionalized creative support for young and independent choreographers in Poland – an idea seen in the Art Spaces-Katowice Program recently established with support from the Institute of Music and Dance (as well as Ministry of Culture and National Heritage). Currently he is working on international dance projects “Roots of Dance” established by the National Institute of Music and Dance. He is pursuing his new academic career with the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice. His main areas of research interest include, persistent systems of identity formation, embodied culture, contemporary transformations of citizenship, etc. Jacek is a graduate of pedagogy department of dance at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw,
About the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company
Bringing the dynamic freedom of American modern dance together with the elegant splendor of Asian art, the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company is one of the most visible Asian American dance companies in America. Ms. Chen's unique choreography transports audiences beyond cultural boundaries to the common ground between tradition and innovation, discipline and freedom, and form and spirit.
Since its inception in 1988, the company has earned a broad base of public support and has toured extensively to major performing arts centers throughout more than thirty states. Presented by some of the most prestigious concert halls in the United States, from the Joyce Theater in New York to the Ordway Center in Minnesota and the Cerritos Center in California, the Company has mounted more than twenty national tours and nine tours abroad. Ms. Chen’s work has been presented by such acclaimed international festivals as the Silesian International Contemporary Dance Festival and the Konfrontations International Dance Festival, both in Poland, the Chang Mu International Arts Festival in Korea and the Meet in Beijing International Arts Festival. The Company was also honored by a distinctive grant award from both the President's Committee on Arts and Humanities and the Department of State to represent the United States in a seven-city tour arranged by the Tamaulipas International Arts Festival in Mexico. Also, the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company has the unique honor of having received more than fifteen awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous Citations of Excellence and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
In addition to its extensive season of touring and performing, the company has developed Arts in Education residency programs in school districts to bring culture and arts into educational settings. It’s colorful and engaging in-school assembly program “The Art of Chinese Dance” has been presented in hundreds of schools in NJ, NY, CT and PA, reaching hundreds of thousands of youth. The Company is currently in-residence at New Jersey City University and assisting NJCU in the development of a new BFA in Dance.
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