AUDIENCE REVIEW: Yang Sun and Poets premiere "The Stranger"
Company:
Yang Sun and Poets
Performance Date:
11/7/2024
Freeform Review:
Folding, shaking, shifting. Shaping, pacing, leaning. Longing, holding, hoarding, saving. Searching, restructuring, constructing, containing, imagining, revising, envisioning, resurrecting…yielding…honoring.
Yang Sun, founder of Yang Sun and Poets, left me vibrating with these verbs following her remarkable evening-length work, The Stranger, presented at Hi-ARTS on November 7th, 2024. The Stranger, a fully immersive dance installation combining a brilliant original sound score, vibrant and striking choreographic sequencing presented in the round, and a rich, multi-layered set, shares the stories of immigrants across generations as they wrestle with belonging, safety, lineage, and home.
The work started with a grand pass throughout the building, as the audience shuffled upstairs through several connecting staircases and then back down into the installation space, guided by the performers. There was an elevator option available for individuals with accessibility needs, enabling them to participate in the vertical journey that started the work. The performers walked alongside us, sharing fragments of stories from their childhoods as we went. From the beginning, we were part of a journey, establishing the narrative of traverse through our bodies. Multiple recurrences of this narrative later in the work resonated viscerally through our collective memory of our shared route. Later, when the cast created a long pathway with over 10 large, stuffed woven plastic bags across the stage – a central motif and key artifact in The Stranger– we once again faced a traverse as one dancer attempted to navigate the bags despite their uneven, unstable base.
Balancing, resisting, advancing.
The Stranger’s interlocking chapters consistently wove the audience into the fabric of the dance. As audience members, we were asked and trusted to make space and share space with the performers as they leaned into – and at times hurled themselves at – the walls where we rested to view the work. I could feel the vibrations of their movement in my sit bones – the dancers carried such a deep grounding and physical resonance in their movement that we could literally feel the dance in our musculature. These choices highlighted the interconnectedness between the audience and performers, generated a deep sense of understanding and mutuality.
Vibrating, unsettling, sharing.
The Stranger is ripe with stories, and Sun’s choreography plays a central role in weaving these narratives. The choreographic design combines a crisp and heavy precision with a dream-like weightlessness, moving us through states of sorrow, terror, imagination, hope, and liberation with every choice. In a solo danced by Sun, her gestures, fluidity in and out of the floor, and expansive focus captured real and imagined lineages and conversations with ancestors as they traced outlines in the space, conjuring ghosts. During the first moment of synchronized group dance, dancers Yang Sun, Nicole Arakaki, Angélica María Barbosa Rodríguez, and Nikkie Samreth threw themselves into a powerful, bone-deep movement sequence in which they were repeatedly magnetized to the bags and then launched into the air again. The falls, safely cushioned by stuffed bags, contrasted with the danger of being anchored to repeatedly returning to the floor, creating a recurring tension between safety and risk, flight and grounding, and trust and resistance throughout the work. In another instance of heightened contrast, Nikkie Samreth slowly climbed a pillar that bifurcated the floor as the other performers frantically piled the stuffed bags beneath them. They expanded their legs out, levitating, before falling abruptly, several feet down, their landing punctuated by the sound of their body smacking plastic.
Heeding, floating, sinking.
A solo by performer Angélica María Barbosa Rodríguez held particular resonance as an exquisite story, a narrative of humanness and raw becoming that filtered through the entire work. In slow, teetering tip-toe steps backwards, she mapped a diagonal line from one side of the space to the center while unraveling her long braid. She was doing and undoing, gathering and unlinking, decoupling herself from the tether of the braid and unleashing herself. Once her hair was completely unbraided, Rodríguez came undone, thrashing and throwing her body in a powerful release. At one point, she put her hand in her mouth, trying to get rid of what was inside, or perhaps trying to know it on a visceral level, to confront it, taste it, consume it. It was a declaration of her power as real, whole, and vast. The solo finished with another dancer’s intervention, holding her up and grounding her down, finding solace in allowing herself to be held.
Mending, sifting, restoring.
In a time when the word “immigration” is used as a violent and divisive political tool and the real stories of folks with immigrant lineages and lived experiences of immigration are being actively and intentionally silenced, Sun’s work is a striking and critical antidote to this erasure. The Stranger is a thoroughly embodied, deeply nuanced, undeniably rich performance work that centers real immigrants’ stories and tangles together a razor sharp exploration of the fear and uncertainty created by the violent U.S. immigration system with a vision for collective care and genuine belonging that holds space for fear, hope, sorrow, anger, and joy.
The Stranger finished with a slow, steady traverse; the performers carried the woven plastic bags on their shoulders, walking in a horizontal line as they combed through the entire stage, the air thick with the ghosts of stories told throughout the hour-long installation. As they moved from one end of the space towards the other, Sun and community cast member, Shenghan Gao, remained, sitting with their legs crossed, playing an imaginary game of Cat’s Cradle. With goosebumps, I watched fully captivated as they traded imaginary strings back and forth between their fingers. I knew the strings wouldn’t fall. I held my breath. They were building a new world between their hands, full of possibility, full of safety, full of ease.
Resisting, yearning, carrying.
–
Author:
Lucia Gagliardone
Website:
luciagagliardone.com
Photo Credit:
Elyse Mertz
