At first, the stage is dark, oppressively so. A dim light brings the piano’s keyboard into the scene, while the spotlight gradually turns to reveal a figure, clad completely in black. This is dance and music, stripped down to their bare essentials: no frills, no fireworks, no fancy moves; yet the dramatic tension in each note, in each and every move, leaves the air almost palpitating.
As An Tôn Thất’s impressionistic music drifts ephemerally, another figure—also dressed in black save for a white shirt—enters, pulling the other back from the invisible fourth wall which he is just about to shatter. Huang Yi’s inventiveness is unbelievable: now the music is no longer “music”, but rather the sounds of a pen on paper, the clinking of a glass, the breaking of pencils, yet his movements would lead one to believe he was being led by an entire symphony of sounds.
An’s music then takes a classical turn, at times baroque even, as Huang Yi and Hu Jian engage in a pas de deux reminiscent of Norman McLaren’s animation, set to Bach, in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. As the music then returns to its beginning sparse texture, the two parallel lines of Huang Yi and Hu Jian converge on the piano, and as the two alternate their turns and twists on the keyboard, music and movement merge into a single monochrome. An then returns, building the music up into a sonorous symphony of sound, with six hands on the piano. This then fades out, with the piece ending on a song sung by Hu Jian to sparse chords, echoing the beginning. Lights fade out, drawing out a full circle.
Is this piece music or dance? Saying that it is “both” is an understatement, since all the elements melt together into an organic whole, until one cannot be separated from the other. Narrative is absent, nor is it ever needed: as Huang Yi says in his program notes, “Everyone can have a different interpretation… all that I want to convey is in the work.” Yet as I left the theatre, I still had one question in mind: why yellow?
