DANCE REVIEW : High Tech Hurts Chinese Company

To the blare of traditional instruments, an imposing painted backdrop of the Great Wall rises, and a snakelike, fluorescent blue dragon appears, chasing a chartreuse ball on a smoky stage. Soon a luminous purple dragon enters and the two creatures wind their bodies around thick pillars, the ball suspended in space between them.

Presented by the National Dance Company of China on Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, this dragon dance features timeless Chinese sounds and images enhanced and also overwhelmed by modern theater-technology: the use of microphones, loudspeakers, moving scenery and (especially) black light.

In the process, something that can be delightful in a lowly street-festival performance has been both inflated and undercut, a problem with most of the selections in this 15-part program.

Alas, native instruments such as the So Na and Zheng that were created to cut through the air with their distinctive timbres can sound distorted or abrasive when amplified. And dances with an authentic social context lose much of their vigor and all of their point when refined into rootless movement-curios.

Often they become utterly synthetic--not Chinese but chinoiserie, as when folk material is “enhanced” with classical ballet technique (Wang Shaoqiu’s solo in the “Mongolian Herdsman’s Dance”). Elsewhere the lack of context invites a cloying, chamber-of-commerce sweetness (the women’s fan and umbrella numbers).

Indeed, by the end of the evening, one longs for a bold statement of women’s prowess--the kind of thing Chinese gymnastic troupes commonly provide--or even the dancing women’s rifle regiments from the ridiculous (and now discredited) “Red Detachment of Women” era. Anything but more simpering lotus-blossom cliches.

Relief does come (briefly) in Yang Liping’s show-stopping “Peacock Dance” in which tiny, sharply defined muscular isolations of the arms become a metaphor for bird-motion and then are contrasted with liquid limb action and smooth multiple turns. It’s quite a tour de force--something like alternating, phrase by phrase, motifs belonging to Mikhail Fokine’s fierce, jittery Firebird and his soft, flowing Dying Swan.

Here Yang Liping displays the unmistakable individuality of an artist. But she’s seen only once, and National Dance Company of China has nobody else like her, though its musicians are certainly accomplished and its corps dancers highly skillful--especially in the coordinated virtuosity of the “Long-Tassel Drum Dance” and the gymnastic stunts of the finale. The problem is one of taste and intention.

The company never pretends to be doing real folk dance (the house program and a spoken introduction specify that contemporary choreography is employed in all the presentations), but truth-in-packaging is no excuse for the evening’s overload of condescending Sino-kitsch and the relentless hands-across-the-sea audience courting.

After all, by now American audiences have seen the Peking Opera, the Central Ballet of China, major instrumental ensembles and four or five of the mainland’s greatest acrobatic troupes.

So what’s the point of importing a middlebrow sampler revue with everything from classic ribbon-dances to a contemporary pop singer (Cheng Fanyuan)? If the Chinese insist on trivializing their heritage, let them do it at home.