Dance review: In Birdy, Hung Dance makes endless, artful play with feathered headpieces of Chinese opera
Dreamlike Taiwanese show explores freedom and oppression, with Ling Zi becoming everything from spiky weapons to shivering life forces all their own
Hung Dance’s Birdy. Photo by K2 Tsai
DanceHouse presents Hung Dance’s Birdy at the Vancouver Playhouse to November 29
BOBBING, SHIVERING, SWAYING, AND spiking straight up at attention, the four-foot-long Ling Zi pheasant feathers in Birdy are like another set of dancers.
Lit like an oil painting, the new work from Taiwan’s Hung Dance, presented here by DanceHouse, makes endless, sophisticated play with the feathered headpieces of ancient Chinese opera. Vignette after flowing vignette explores the choreographic—and often calligraphic—potential of the undulating objects, recasting them as living contemporary artworks. If you can score tickets for the last show tonight, you’re in for a polished, visually stunning treat that has sold out at festivals around the world.
Amid the surreal, sculptural group work, some of rising young choreographer Lai Hung-Chung’s best moments seem to decelerate time, the dancers moving so the feathers on top of their heads sway in surreal slow motion. Adding to the dreamlike feel, two bodies sometimes bend away from each other, arching gradually back in Cs, the feather arcing with them.
The work explores freedom and oppression, themes that take on deeper resonance in light of the country where this piece was made. The feathers sometimes appear weaponlike; at one point, a dancer draws one across another’s throat like a knife. Other times, they fly through the air like arrows. In one of the darker moments, bodies pulse, one face illuminated in red, mouth open in rebellion and anguish.
At other points, though, the wiggling plumage becomes its own life force—an assertion of birdlike freedom against the pulsing electro-acoustic soundtrack. In one dazzling moment, a dancer stands with her feather bolt upright while the six other dancers writhe frenetically around her, snapping their headpieces like whips.
Birdy consistently avoids feeling gimmicky, not only because it finds such inventive, shape-shifting qualities in its central objects, but also because it works such a unique tension between the customs of the ancient past and Taiwan's bold present. 
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