NOMAD: THE RIVER

Salter
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Salter Chris
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Salter Chris
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Salter Chris
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Nomad: The River is a 60 minute dance theater work created in collaboration with Chinese born, New York-based choreographer Yin Mei. The work is a haunting evocation of the choreographer's experience growing up in the political hysteria of the Cultural Revolution.

Featuring six dancers, the visual and sonic scenography aims to create a magical realm of memories, fantasies, traumatic experience and transformation. 25 fiberglass mesh screens are suspended across the stage area, spread over three pipes and staggered so that projected images from both front and side saturate the surfaces with image and light. At times, the surfaces appear to disappear, replaced by stark, black and white woodcut-like natural forms: gnarled trees, pools of water, chinese characters that melt like snow. The multichannel, electronically generated score and sound design underscores the tension found in the media between artifice and nature; electronic and found sounds entangle with each other, producing aural landscapes that express the tensions of the Cultural Revolution's violent and tumultuous epoch.