H.T. Chen & Dancers To Perform Teahouse Performance, Today

Ring in the New Year - Year of the Rooster - with one of Chen Dance Center's delightful Teahouse Performances, February 16, 7 PM at Chen Dance Center, 70 Mulberry Street, in NYC's Chinatown. H.T. Chen & Dancers, joined by guest artist Ayaka Kamei, will present a program of works that includes traditional, historical, and humorous dances by Chen, opening with a traditional Lantern Procession and closing with the celebratory Confetti dance, joined by several adorable children from dance school at Chen Dance Center.

Celebrating traditional cultural heritage through contemporary dance, the Company will perform excerpts from H.T.'s Meditations of a Drunken Peacock, Hidden Voices, and Between Heaven & Earth.

For his major work, Meditations of a Drunken Peacock, H.T. took his inspiration from 11th century Chinese poet Su Tung Po who expresses the desire to have flowers and the moon as drinking companions. Jack Anderson pronounced the work "a charming premiere......H.T. Chen made intoxication an aesthetic pleasure," adding that "The choreographic high spirits were enhanced by a score by Bradley Kaus filled with remarkably diverse and constantly changing rhythms and timbres." (The New York Times, May 9, 2001)

Hidden Voices was premiered at LaMaMa E.T.C. in 1994, and is set to music by Grammy Award-winner Zhou Long. The work is based on the experience of Chinese immigrants who, in the late 1870's, were recruited from San Francisco as strikebreakers by a factory owner in North Adams, Mass. during a strike by local union workers. For the sake of their own safety, the workers were sequestered within the factory grounds, where they survived on memories of their homeland and in the hopes of a better life in the future.

Between Heaven and Earth was a collaboration with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and premiered in 2009 at Queens College. H.T. was inspired by the music of two composers, Zhou Long and Chen Yi, finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for music. The work explores the relationship between traditional Chinese culture and the natural world.