Repertoire
The Flower Knot
Red Span's newest work will be called The Flower Knot and will involve 5 dancers Suhali Micheline from Malaysia, Tony Ngugen (Vietnamese-Australian), Nick Sommerville and Abbie Sherwood (Australian), and Jacob Brown (indigenous Australian). It will continue to build on a strong team of dancers and designers that have worked together successfully as part of Feng Feng's postgraduate studies in 2005 and 2006.
The piece will be based on the historical Chinese fine art of the flower knot, which has evolved from the knots used in daily life over thousands of years. The craft prospered in Tang and Song Dynasty, and approached the high peak in Ming and Qing Dynasty. Today, it has continued to evolve into a highly specialised practice. The character of Chinese knots is that every knot is weaved from just one thread, and every basic knot is named by its appearance and meaning. Different knots are interlaced, or combined with other adornments to develop special, auspicious garnishes, which are colourful and full of profound meanings. Almost all the basic knots are in a symmetrical form and are three dimensional in structure. They have embellished palace halls as well as gracing countryside households as daily implements and have also appeared in paintings, sculptures, and other pieces of folk art.
With the foundation for work based on a cross-cultural premise, Feng Feng Wang intends to use movement to explore the many aspects of the flower knot from the physical process of creating a knot itself, to utilising their design as a structural template for the work, as well as exploring their symbolic meaning as abstract concepts. Flower knots in Chinese culture carry meanings of reunion, friendliness, warmth, marriage, and love. In addition, in Chinese language the word knot (jie) also has the same pronunciation as "festival", so Chinese knots are often used to express good wishes including happiness, prosperity, love and the celebration of community. Furthermore, the Chinese word for string (sheng) has the same pronunciation as the Chinese word for God. This dance work hopes to explore the metaphoric possibilities of an ethnically diverse group of dancers intertwined in symmetrical patterns by metaphysical string, suggesting moments of interconnectedness, in that these threads of spirituality can unify an increasingly global community. In this way The Flower Knot may come to express the bonding possibilities between Asian and western cultures.
The music will again be composed by Gus Macmillan and there will be a video component created by film maker Richard Vetti.
The Flower Knot is also intended to be a companion piece to the work Xing that Red Span Dance Company developed in 2006 as part of the Victorian Arts Centre's Full Tilt funding initiative.
- Choreographer
- Feng Feng Wang
- Composer & Sound Designer
- Gus Macmillan
- Videoographer
- Richard Vetti
- Costume Designer
- Tony Nyugen
- Dancers
- Nick Sommerville
- Tony Nyugen
- Abbie Niine Sherwood
- Yi Zhang
- Suhaili Ahmad Kamil
Xing explores the circulation between the five traditional Chinese Taoism elements of wood, fire, earth, water, and metal.
The five elements, also called Wu Xing represent the processes that are fundamental to the cycles of nature. The Chinese term xing means the process of one thing acting upon another. In relation to the five elements, the cycle of processes as Yin and Yang can be represented as:
- wood feeds fire
- fire creates ashes which form earth
- inside the earth, metal which is heated liquifies and produces water vapour
- water genertated then nourishes the trees, or wood
Each dancer, whilst never becoming literal representations of these elements, embody through the performance, subtle detailed shifts - temporary moments of balance, harmonization of occurrence, growth, development, symmetry and change.
The original music for the piece has been written, performed and recorded by Gus Macmillan, and reflects the interchangeable nature of themes of Xing, with new sounds or instrumentation introduced as each performer's journey commences, developing in parallel to the structure as the performance plays out. The process of composing and developing the music was strongly inter-linked to the choreographer's rehearsal processes and practices.
The re-staging of the piece includes a live performance by singer Christine Mowinckel, who sang on the recording of the previous score.
Xing was developed as part of the VCA School of Dance, Master of Choreography Program.
- Choreographer
- Feng Feng Wang
- Composer & Sound Designer
- Gus Macmillan
- Lightin Designer
- Alexandre Malta
- Costume Designer
- Tony Nyugen
- Dancers
- Nick Sommerville
- Tony Nyugen
- Yi Zhang
- Danielle Canavan
- Suhaili Ahmad Kamil
- Vocalist
- Christine Mowinkel
- Photography
- Caitlan Street
The Treasure
16 minutes
Choreographers Notes
This work, consisting of two dancers, and a live musician performing original music composed specifically for the piece. It explores the behaviors of two people intimately and inextricably caught together. It opens up and re-embodies precious moments in their relationship. I wanted to present the study in much the same way we might show or display an artifact or treasure in a gallery.
In Treasure this conceptualization of the relationship between feminine and masculine blends with my understanding of emotion and leads to explorations of levels within various emotional states, such as comfort, play, exclusion, support, dissonance, compromise, passiveness, initiative, care and mutuality. They became the basis for developing scores for improvisation - identifying and further manipulating key movement from the different sexes bodily energy. From the way of Yin (hidden, passive, receptive, yielding, cool, soft, feminine) and the way of Yang (evident, active, aggressive, controlling, hot, hard, masculine) came the relative physical qualities for the performance.
In my knowledge of Chinese philosophy, yin and yang have never been associated with specific moral or aesthetic values. What is Chinese beauty or beneficial is neither yin nor yang but the dynamic balance between the two.
It is my contention that human relations are not as simple as white or black; lover or enemy. Mostly it stays within a dynamic state - a balance - neither pure Yin nor Yang, and may not be hot or cool. It contains many different tastes - sweet, salty, spicy, and acid. I found that subtle senses can be beautifully drawn by very fine strokes of body language.
- Choreographer
- Feng Feng Wang
- Composer & Musician
- Gus Macmillan
- Lighting Designer
- Alexandre Malta
- Dancers
- Kylie Jane Wilson
- Nick Sommerville