Chinese Dancers off 'The Wall'

[madd74]

By CLIVE BARNES
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February 11, 2005 -- PINK Floyd and Red China make strange, albeit color coordinated, bedfellows.
Surely, Beijing is hardly the first city that comes to mind when thinking of modern dance.

Yet the Beijing Modern Dance Company ? making its New York debut at the Joyce on Tuesday, just in time for the Year of the Rooster ? had something to crow about.

Unhappily, it was chiefly for the project's originality more than its execution.

The troupe's full-evening, 70-minute work, "Rear Light," was inspired by the video "Pink Floyd's The Wall," which the ballet's co-choreographers, Li Han-Zhong and his wife, Ma Bo, received as a gift.

To this flat, flatulent and dated (1979) piece of British rock, these Chinese choreographers have devised a dance apparently intended to suggest soul-searching in all widest and narrowest meanings. But it really doesn't work.

Set against and on skeletal bleachers made of tubular steel surmounted by a bank of powerful lights, the 13-dancer troupe energetically and enthusiastically offers athletically demanding routines.



Dressed chiefly in white shirt, black tie and black pants, these good-looking dancers apparently go through a Kafkaesque existential hell that doubtless has far more meaning to Chinese audiences still locked in a largely repressive society.

"Rear Light" gets kudos for its political courage and artistic enterprise, but its concept is mercilessly old-fashioned and its choreography uninspired.

BEIJING MODERN DANCE COMPANY Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. at 19th Street. Through Sunday. (212) 242-0800.

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