Music joins dance in 'Experiment'

Growing up in a musical family, Mimi Yin, PC '98, knew the musician's stereotype of dancers: they can't count, can't read a score, can't recognize music beyond the obvious cues. Yin herself took ballet as a child, then quit to concentrate on music; it wasn't until she arrived at Yale that she rediscovered dance as an art form.

LIZ OLINER/YH The cast lights up Silliman's Common Room.

Now Yin--musician, dancer, and choreographer--is breaking down stereotypes with Experiment: Original Choreography to Original Music. The hour-long show consists of two pieces choreographed by Yin--one to a score by fellow composition student Michael Early, ES '98--and two improvisational pieces set to live, spontaneous music. Experiment is designed to do more than prove that dancers can think musically, however; Yin also wants to push dance at Yale in new directions. "Most dance shows are very disconnected," she explained, referring to the typical recital format of a dozen separate 10 minute pieces strung together. Yin wanted to see not pieces or skits, but full-length ballets, set to contemporary music that's not pop or R&B.

Yin wisely realized that Yale isn't the most conducive environment for large ballets--dance is still the only major art form without an academic class or department. Experiment is a compromise, or a stepping stone: the show's four pieces could be movements of a single work, and the 20 minute "Night," set to Early's An Du Hast die Leben Verkeundet , is a fully-realized ballet on its own. Taken as a whole, the evening has enough new ideas in sound and movement to make up for its brevity.

This is not to say that the steps themselves are especially experimental. Yin sets her dances within standard modern technique, and her ballet training is obviously a strong influence. Rather, it's the relationship between music and movement that announces something new. Four dancers set the agenda in the evening's two improvisations.

Improv is easy to do badly, but these four--Yin, Sidra Bell, SY '01, Kate Jack-man, TD '98, and Alison Brown, TD '99--respond with precision and understanding to each musical idea Klang presents. Yin noted that at one rehearsal, music-ians and dancers switched roles in an attempt to help performers understand both art forms. The organic cohesion of the result is a reminder of why live music is so important.

Luciano Berio's Sequenza III, the score for Yin's "Medusa," challenges the dancers more directly, using sounds as unorthodox as laughter, groaning, and chatter amidst the notes of a soprano solo. Yin's choreography, which is patterned and elegant, helps the listener understand the music's fundamental lyricism. Yet the dance examines itself as much as it examines its score: repeated motifs--a stylized jog, for example, or sustained arabesque--are dissected in slow motion and developed with multiple dancers.

So by the time Early sits down at the piano with Cynthia Miller, DC '98, on violin and So-Young Kim, TC '00, on cello, the audience is trained to seek the kinds of connections Yin beautifully develops in "Night." Here, her choreographic invention sets a cast of seven to using every inch of the (too-cramped) Silliman College Common Room stage, lifting, reflecting, and complementing each other. The movement sequences that tended slightly towards the academic in preceding pieces blossom here into a quiet joy. Score and steps become individually articulated aspects of a nuanced whole. Yin is a musician creating dance and a choreographer setting music--and both artists should be pleased with the results.

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