LED—CHING CHING WONG

Photo: © Michelle Bliss

In Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express, Cop 223 (He Zhiwu), played by Takeshi Kaneshiro, aims to understand the breakup of a relationship by obsessing on the April 1st expiration date of a can of pineapple. As he reflects on heartbreak, the impermanence of love and the longing to preserve memories, he asks himself: “If memory can be canned, would they also have expiration dates?" Premiering at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival (no pun intended), Chungking Express helped solidify Wong Kar-wai’s international reputation and became a touchstone of 1990s world cinema. Over time, it developed a reputation as one of the defining romantic films of its era, endlessly revisited for its mood, music, and melancholy. 

Most recently, it has been revisited by choreographer Ching Ching Wong, fueling her expanded sentiment: “If memories came in a can, I hope that can never expires. If it has to expire, I hope it has a shelf life of 10,000 years.” Thus, the first episode of her evolving series The Shelf Life was born in collaboration with artists from Salt Lake City’s SALT Contemporary Dance (founded in 2013 in an effort to bring new contemporary dance to Utah). As the opening segment of LED Boise’s evening showcase of Ching Ching Wong’s choreography, the second installment of their “LED Presents” series, members of SALT accompanied Ching Ching to recreate Shelf Life, Episode 1 for LED’s audience. 

As noted by LED: “Welcome to The Shelf Life—your memory marketplace, where every past moment of your life is at your fingertips in our Tin-Canned System™. Meet KEL, your automated memory manager, she’ll reunite you with your favorite memories and some long forgotten ones too.” The artists of SALT—Quincie Bean, Maxi Riley, Kannen Glanz, Teres Castaneda, Jayda Escobar and Mia Huber—vigorously launch into Ching Ching’s staged and often bittersweet ruminations on memory. As unreliable a narrator as I have found memory to be in my own life, there is no denying its force as a fecund source of narration, often edited by distance, sometimes deleted by necessity, but a story always capable of being revisited and retold. 

True to the metaphor of the Tin-Canned System™, cans are The Shelf Life’s central prop. As Quincie Bean stacks them one upon the other to form a balanced pyramid, the remaining dancers swirl around her threatening to knock them over. Kannen Glanz, the only male in the ensemble, provides the handsome and virile axis around which the sinuous strength of the young women circumambulate. His “tilt” creates a vertical line between one leg grounded on the floor and the other elevated above his head; an astounding physicality that halted my breath. With a loud clatter, he and the other dancers recklessly scatter cans all over the floor, inciting Bean to anger in response, purposely wrecking the calm control of her stacked cans by petulantly, violently, knocking them over. This speaks, I think, to the inability to control memories even as one returns to them again and again to attempt a seeming order to one’s life. As if by reclaiming memories we can self-determine the uncertain course of our future. 

Photo: © Michelle Bliss

But memories tend to be messy. I felt concern for the dancers performing between cans scattered all over the floor. One foot landing wrong could result in a nasty accident. Consummate dexterity on the part of the dancers avoided that, of course, much in the same way that one must negotiate between memories moving forward in life; the past being both source and obstacle. 

Speaking of messy and hazardous obstacles, a woman with a bad wig smoking cigarettes emerges from the side of the stage pushing a shopping cart festooned with Christmas lights. She buffoonishly gathers up the cans, grunting and groaning, pausing now and again to puff smoke from her cigarette while flinging cans into her cart over a prolonged sequence that finally leaves the set swept and ready for the next program. It was a hilarious janitorial bit augmented by Chaz Gentry’s overhead crisscross latticework lighting that deepened the comedy with enforced theatricality. 

What becomes evident from the diverse demonstrations of conjoined and disjointed movement, stiff and fluid, from the structural storytelling that compels and informs Ching Ching Wong’s choreography, combined with KEL’s automated statements projected onto the back wall of the stage, an innovative use of props, and a solid grasp of ribald humor, is the assurance that—when it comes to expiration dates—Ching Ching Wong’s creative genius has none. 

Taking advantage of the SALT artists, the second part of the evening’s program was an opportunity for Lauren Edson to choreograph Love Is A Place (Excerpts), which used a door as a liminal prop to express spatiality, dividing and separating the dancers from each other in varying scenarios. Value added was a recording of Tilda Swinton reciting Rumi’s “Like This”, Michael Silverman’s adagio, and the Beatles picturing themselves in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. 

Quincie Bean and Mia Huber face off to each other from opposite sides of the door while the remaining dancers move to Joan Baez’s concert rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. The applause at the end of Baez’s live performance allows the dancers to rush up to the audience to receive their own before leaving the stage. Bean and Huber remain behind to perform a fascinating pas de deux where they mirror each other’s movements but remain distinct in their own bodies, differentiated by their unique anatomies. 

After intermission, the evening’s third program Prologue choreographed by Wong was a new work developed over the past few weeks at The Dixon. Much as The Shelf Life, Episode 1 was inspired by the words of Wong Kar-wai, the source of Prologue’s inspiration lies with writer / filmmaker Darcy Van Poelgeest from his comics Little Bird and Precious Metal: “If you’re feeling lost, then go back to where you last remember seeing yourself.” Again, an optimistic homage and hopeful return to the potential remedies of memory. 

Photo: © Michelle Bliss

“These words,” Ching Ching Wong explains, “have haunted me, seeped into my dreams, made their way into my work. They have urged me to take action, to explore, to seek that person I had lost or was losing. I started making works with that above notion in mind, across the span of one year and five companies, all in episodic form.” 

To capture this episodic resuscitation, visiting artists Francesca Romo and Brendan Duggan enact a couple who seem to be frantically attempting to escape each other as much as they are compulsively drawn back to one another. Theirs is a push me pull you interaction with Francesca comically interrupting their performance with notes and suggestions of how to make it better, much to Brendan’s fatigue. He patiently if begrudgingly allows her to place a hot pink fright wig on his head and he obliges her when she situates them at the back door and sends him out into the rain. Their comedy is this side of an unexpected coupling between Buster Keaton and Mike Nichols. 

Romo’s slight frame contrasted against Duggan’s heft becomes inverted when their shadows are cast onto the back wall of the stage. I found myself fascinated, if willingly distracted, by their dancing shadows. Often in their shadow dance Romo looms larger than Duggan, suggesting the same power play expressed through their comedy. 

The theme of projected identity is further amplified when Romo and Duggan face a filmic version of themselves positioned exactly as they are on stage. A slight change in costume reveals the simulation. It’s a truly eerie and oneiric flourish where Romo sets out to move exactly as her counterpart in the film, as if she is indeed following Darcy van Poelgeest’s advice. In this segment, Ching Ching Wong has evocatively created conceptual poetry through dance film.