Farewell My King
© Maddy Freeman
© Maddy Freeman
© Maddy Freeman
© Maddy Freeman
Dance
For my solo Farewell My King, the concept germinates from a character study of Concubine Yu, the female character in an iconic work of Peking Opera who performs a splendid dance with swords for Xiang Yu, the once Mighty King of Chu, as he faces the devastating military failure at the end of his life. Concubine Yu took her own life shortly after this dance with swords, and the plot was re-dramatized into a twentieth-century setting by a legendary Chinese film Farewell My Concubine (1993), wherein the protagonist Cheng Dieyi, a Peking-Opera artist who performs Concubine Yu throughout his life, eventually commits suicide himself in one rehearsal. Embodying a curious amalgam of theatrical lineages, I translate the dance with swords into modern, angular postures and fragmented phrases, perform on an empty stage to the cerebral sound track of Ryuichi Sakamoto, and, acting upon a realization of the King’s absence, reconfigure the codified movement with sudden bursts of energy and anguished repetitions which culminate in a sacrificial gesture that pays my homage to the most-reincarnated piece in the modern dance tradition, The Rite of Spring.
Choreography / Performance: ZIWEI 子维
Music: Ryuichi Sakamoto, from Derrida (2002)
Technical Direction: Jennifer Birge
Production Management: Traci Clapper
Lighting / Technical Support: Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre crew
Video Documentation: Maddy Freeman
Developed in Choreography: A Field Guide for Dance with Kathryn Posin, New York University
Presentations
Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre, New York, USA