Festival Schedule
Date: January 21 & 28, 2005
Time: Friday, 6:00PM to 8:00PM
Place: Martin Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Corner of 34th Street, Manhattan
Nomad: The River, is inspired by Yin Mei’s own search for spiritual meaning – a search which began in a childhood clouded by China’s Cultural Revolution, but blessed by dreams of a world beyond.
Nomad: The River revolves around the symbol of the river – the holy river, the river of life, the river as the source and endpoint of human longing and desire, the river as both sacred and profane reality. The work draws context from two actual rivers – the Yellow River in China and the Ganges in India. The work draws context from two actual rivers – the Yellow River in China and the Ganges in India. Yin Mei grew up along the banks of China’s Yellow River. Known both as the cradle of Chinese civilization and as “China’s Sorrow” due to the tremendous floods arising from it, the Yellow River – named for the mud that clouds its waters – is considered the soul of China. It is, for the Chinese, a locus of ghosts and ghost stories, of mythical happenings, of destruction, of disasters and of transformation. Likewise, for the Indian people, the Ganges is a holy and inviolate body of water – a river from which they drink, on which they cremate their dead in floating pyres, and in which they ritually bathe – despite its being one of the most polluted bodies of water on earth.
The duality represented by these fabled rivers drives the choreography and visual environment of Nomad: The River. The work begins when a young woman walks onto the stage, turns on an old-fashioned radio and stares deeply into its lighted dial. As the music pours forth, it opens up a magical realm of memories, fantasies and transformation. Projections transform the theater space into a world beyond and the stage becomes a river along which a ghostly boat carries the dancers on their journey. With the young woman and her radio serving throughout as a gateway between the physical and the spiritual, the work continually shifts between the longing to escape the world and the rawness and danger of the here-and-now in which we must, inevitably, find our way.
