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Multi-Media With Ancient Roots
Han Tang Yuefu Music and Dance Ensemble revive Taiwan’s dance opera tradition
Han Tang Yuefu Music and Dance Ensemble
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Ancient times and an Eastern aesthetic slow the pulse of the Joyce Theater this month, November 3–8, when the Taiwanese Han Tang Yuefu Music and Dance Ensemble present a dance drama with roots that reach back to 1000-year-old artistic traditions of painting, dance, music, and drama.
Inspired by a famous painting from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), The Feast of Han Xizai, this musical drama depicts the story of a high-ranking government official with a decadent lifestyle, Han Xizai, who abandons his life of luxury to lead the life of traveling musician. His act is an act of protest against government corruption and accompanying decadence. In the painting, which now lives at the National Museum of Beijing and has considerably outlived numerous other manifestations of government protest since then, we see Han Xizai as he bids farewell to an assemblage of servants, concubines, musicians and dancers, before becoming a nomad.
But the painting is more than just a painting. It reaches into artistic traditions of multifarious media and depicts styles of dance, music, fashion, and floristry that reigned at the time. We see, not all things multi-media were born in the 21st century.
The quarter-century-old Han Tang Yuefu company bring these traditions to life in their six-scene production. Originally established as a group of Nankuan musicians (a music tradition with Chinese roots), the company within a decade made it their mission to revive Taiwan’s dance opera tradition. The Feast of Han Xizai, which premiered in 2002, is their most recent enactment, and it, like its predecessors, clearly confounds our Western categorizations of the arts. Referred to as anything from “stage drama,” to “musical drama,” to “dance drama,” to “opera,” all of the artistic qualities within this “piece”—movement, music, enactment and art—flow so fluidly into one another that differentiation is near impossible.
The performers—dancers? actors? musicians?—slowly, smoothly, soothingly create a place where time advances slowly and any story worth telling is worth telling with detail. The movement is meticulous, the sound is absorbing and costumes and sets, by Tim Yip (the Oscar-winning art director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) further carry us to a place of timelessness.