PIGTAIL (2 mins)

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September 12-14, ISSUE Project Room

PIGTAIL - A Swivel Stool Dance™, is a new movement work utilizing swivel stools (deconstructed office chairs). Distilling a year-long process into an hour, a cast of dancers (Ashley Ervin, Sayoko Kojima, Shelby Nelson, Shelby Tucker and Yi Chen), have adapted to these chairs as extensions of their bodies, together developing a brand new technique. The choreography incorporates sports actions seen in synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics as foundational sources of individual and collaborative movement. During the performance, the audience is also seated in swivel chairs, with the dancers using their motions to influence the overall fluidity of the room.

In summer 2017, Ying staged a three-episode outdoor play, HANG OUT, in Manhattan Chinatown's Sara D. Roosevelt Park. For the production, she used a shopping cart to transport overflowing props back-and-forth between Manhattan and Brooklyn many times. She describes, “What surprised me was how I kept getting better at wheeling it [...] after a month-and-a-half, by the end of the production, I was able to roll the cart on a variety of road conditions without disturbing its contents.” PIGTAIL is inspired by such a tiny phenomenon and humanity’s ability to progressively adapt to our circumstances. The entire cast began the rehearsal process completely unfamiliar with the swivel stool beyond its immediate function. However, through rigorous practices since October 2018, the group has been walking, skating and moving more freely with the stools.

PIGTAIL is a dance of our technological time, where knowledge has become both increasingly inaccessible and available. In her notes on the piece, Ying describes how knowledge has become rapidly and exponentially specialized and at times made inaccessible in today’s society, especially when being vertically integrated by corporations, institutions, or other sources. For example, a self-taught automobile mechanic may not be able to open and fix a Tesla; or, often, everyday people may have no idea what happens within their laptops or the apps they use on a daily basis. However, knowledge, even certain niche know-hows, have also become horizontally and readily available to the public. Ying, a non-professionally trained choreographer, for instance, has benefited tremendously from online and digital sources and reservoirs of information, powered by consumer technology: youtube, online articles, forums, applications, and hardware. PIGTAIL, in a sense, is a “consumer-level product” set against the complexity of our time as its backdrop.

“Sapiens are tireless, nuts, dreamers. I think about how we arrived at skyscrapers, A/C, GMO crops, etc. [and] how all of this stems from our ceaseless, feverish fantasies towards higher, stronger, faster, better.” Ying adds, “step-by-step, such restlessness informs us about who and what we are.” The swivel chair then, and the dancer’s relationships to it, becomes a symbol for human aspiration, and, ultimately, our drive towards achievement.

PIGTAIL is Ying’s second evening-length dance piece, following Now We Start from the Arm presented at New York’s Emily Harvey Foundation in 2016

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