Beijing Modern Dance Company

Over the weekend, the BEIJING MODERN DANCE COMPANY performed a 70-minute evening length piece set to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd's "The Wall"; the music is an almost surreel mishmash of rock music and harried sound bytes, much of it about some sort of social upheaval. Not having seen the film of "The Wall" and not being familiar with Pink Floyd before seeing this performance, I can't say much about the source material.

But I did enjoy what Beijing Modern Dance Company did with it. Throughout the piece, there were fascinating choices for stage imagery and even more interesting types of movement were being utilized to get the dancers around the stage. Each vignette seemed to tell a kind of mini-story, while finding its own unique visual environment to separate each segment. I can't say I drew any particular theme or message from the whole thing (writing about this piece has indicated that it talks about life in modern China under communist rule), but I still found the visuals consistently interesting throughout.

So even though I was dreading the performance - the last unknown modern dance piece I attended, Random Dance's "Nemesis," was absurd and awful - I walked away immensely satisfied. Great imagery, a subtext of a story, and great dancing pulled the whole thing together.