2017 House Programs Under Siege | Page 8

Yang Liping’s own choreographic practice is firmly anchored in traditions that rarely see expression in mainstream theatre. Paper-cutting is an artform in itself in China, and to attain the status of a professional paper-cutting artist there are strict criteria that must be met at a national level, with recognition bestowed by the Paper Cutting Association in China. More than a mere instrument, the scissors used in paper-cutting are themselves imbued with multiple symbolic meanings. Chinese calligraphy has been refined over more than 4,000 years, and the precise formation of characters allows them to suggest various meanings at once. The Chinese characters for scissors are that of a knife and the symbol for going forward. “So if you’ve want to go forward there’s a knife in front of you,” says Yang. The implications of this formation give rise to many metaphorical uses. “A lot of things in today’s world are supposed to be reasonable but are not, and with scissors cutting everything, cutting all these threads and all these lines and connections in life, things can never be completely right.” Then there’s the volcanic flurries of blood that play out in Under Siege’s epic climactic sequence—what might seem mere artistic flourishes connoting the chaos of war make important use of red feathers, themselves rich with metaphorical potential. “In Under Siege the red feathers are not to show the terrible sense of blood but to give a sense of beauty to the show,” says Yang. “In this case the feathers used are rooster or chicken feathers, and in Chinese culture these feathers mean a lot of things. If you say there’s feathers all around, it’s like it’s raining cats and dogs. In Chinese there’s proverbs saying if something’s really bad there’s a whole ground of feathers everywhere. Somebody’s step can be as heavy as a mountain or it can be as light as a feather. It means a lot of different things.” The music of Under Siege is hundreds of years old— “it’s very traditional music and it’s rarely played on stage in a modern show”—but as with so much of the work, its deployment is a way of connecting historical cultural references with a form of theatre that is utterly contemporary. The dance, conversely, might seem light years from traditional Chinese opera, but Yang’s own choreographic practice is firmly anchored in traditions that rarely see expression in mainstream theatre. Raised in the Bai ethnic minority in rural China, Yang’s early explorations of the important Bai symbol of the Peacock eventually saw the choreographer and dancer achieving fame across the country as its ‘Peacock Princess’. Yang has since created an extensive body of work that explores similarly fertile dances and musical traditions drawn from ethnic minorities in China, and has assembled these into lush spectacles that give them new life on the national stage. Yip’s designs in collaboration with Yang usually incorporate costumes as well as set. Indeed, Yip says that “costumes are not clothing, they are moving scenery.” While in the West it’s customary to separate these aspects of a production, Yip doesn’t believe such divisions make for better art. “When the show is finished, all elements have to be united. If we separate, the thing will not be whole. This happens all the time in the theatre and in movies. I find that when we design both set and costume, we are covering all the visual aspects of the project. It gives the artwork a language.” All of this is what gives Under Siege the sense of a living, breathing expression of a historical moment that might otherwise seem mired in a far-off time. It is history that speaks to the emotions, not just the mind, and forges connections both timely and universal. —JOHN BAILEY Western audiences,” says Yang. “A large number of Western audiences may not have had access to Chinese opera, which is actually Peking opera, and things like paper cutting, so it may be the first time they’ve seen it on stage.”