The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center presented The Magnificent Peony Dreams: Yin Mei – Installation Performance + Artist Talk livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Thursday 8 November at 3:30 p.m. PST (San Francisco) / 5:30 p.m. CST (Chicago) / 6:30 p.m. EST (New York).
Join us for a day exploring the works and vision of Yin Mei, Chinese-American choreographer, performer, director, and professor of Dance at Queens College, CUNY in conversation with visiting scholars and professors from China as part of the exchange partnership between Shanghai Theatre Academy (STA, China), the Theatre Department at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Employing Chinese energy direction and spatial principles as a means for creating dance within the rubric of contemporary dance theater, Yin Mei aims to make visible the inner world that lies beneath the surface of everyday life—a parallel world beyond material purposes and goals, filled with mystery. As part of a generation of artists growing up and performing during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Yin Mei exposes in her works how personal memories, tattooed images of rage, harmony, solemnity and quiet silence exude an ethereal and illusory mood.
Afternoon screenings will feature excerpts of her works*, and the evening will present an installation performance, with pianist Bill Buchman, dancers Huiwang Zhang and Guanglei Hui, followed by an artist talk by Yin Mei, and a panel with, Marvin Carlson, Peter Eckersall, Yong Fei, Kaiqi Hu, Zhenlin Li and more TBC.
Yin Mei was born in China and started her professional career in traditional Chinese dance during the Cultural Revolution. Joining a leading state dance company at the age of fourteen, she was trained in Chinese traditional dance and Peking opera dance. Before coming to the United States to study modern dance on a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, she was a professional dancer with the Henan Song and Dance Troupe and later a principal dancer with the Hong Kong Dance Company, where she danced leading roles in the traditional Chinese dance repertoire. She is now a professor and the Director of dance at Queens College, City University of New York, and the artistic director of Yin Mei Dance Company.
She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, and a Choreography Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a Fulbright Scholar and has been nominated twice for a Cal-Arts Alpert Award in Choreography. Her productions have been supported multiple times by grants from Rockefeller MAP, New England Foundation for the Arts, National Dance Project, Creative Capital, Meet the Composer, Live Music for Dance, Greenwall Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and more.
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