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Yin Mei in Nomad: The River
by Natasha J. Arbelo
A song plays throughout the small theater. It's taking over our senses and all we see is darkness. The creepy voice of a child surprises the audience as they sit there waiting for something to happen. A young Asian woman walks towards the light in the middle of the stage. For a few minutes we hear a foreign song playing in the background as she does small movements. We see beautifully created scenery that mystifies the audience and brings us into her world. But that's as far as it goes into the realm of interesting.
The eerie music makes you think that there's something coming some time in the near future but everything just stays in the same pace. Nothing ever really changes or becomes interesting until about thirty minutes into the show when the dancers come out in masks and actually do some real dancing. In the beginning you feel the agony and the torture the dancers are feeling but it goes on for too long and you can sense the audience starts to lose interest after a while. Although the music changes and there are different vivid sets, all the dance moves remain repetitive and constant to a point where you can't take it anymore and it almost becomes agonizing to watch this any further.
There was one part that I must say was quite interesting, and that was when the dance took a dramatic turn: the dancers ran around, almost scared, as if running away from something. After that whole ordeal the music changes into peaceful noises and you felt the calming essence of peace. Then they returned back to the same still feeling as the beginning. In one part they jumped around with some big shiny metal objects and it almost seemed ridiculous. It made no sense and it went on for too long. They were also very irritating to the eyes and it made it almost impossible to see what the dancers were doing. Yin Mei does do a good job at conveying a mystical love affair. Some of the parts were a bit sensual but it brought some interesting elements to the dance performance. One part that left the audience in shock because it was so distorted was when the male lead starts painting the dancers' legs red. It certainly gave the audience a confused look that almost made me laugh because once you looked around you'd see a row of shocked faces. In the few minutes of the finale there was some partnering work between the female lead and the male lead and the two other female dancers. That was also appealing to see since it was something different from the routine work they were doing. Personally, I didn't enjoy the experience of watching this. Maybe if she had made her point a bit more clear than it would have been much more interesting for both me and the audience.
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