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PEILING KAO DANCES Maps The Body Through Time & Space
Garth Griball, Medium
August 8, 2024

Pei-Ling Kao slowly walked towards the front of the ODC Theater stage with a stack of notecards in her hands. Dressed in white separates, she read the text of each card, silently or aloud, in Mandarin or English, or sometimes, responded verbally to an unspoken text — “I disagree” — before placing the card on the floor. The dance continued in overlapping(s) of tasks and interpretations.

Since 2018 Kao has been performing commissioned solo dances in Honolulu, San Francisco and Taipei. Where she currently lives and works, where she spent the preceding decade-plus as a performer-choreographer, and her country of birth, respectively. Place, geographic and temporal, are fundamental to the choreography and the dancing.

Kao premiered Palimpsest Corpus at the State of Play festival August 1–4. The evening-length solo is the final iteration of the past 6 years of Kao’s commissions and performances. One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives I & II (2018, 2022) featured 10 unique solos choreographed by Gerald Casel, Peter Espiritu, Molissa Fenley, Betsy Fisher, Christy Funsch, Keith Hennessy, Shinichi Iova-Koga, Ming-Shen Ku, Wen-Chung Lin, and Hope Mohr. Kao created a choreographic response to the 10 solos in ONE BODY (2023), “centering post-colonial land/body specifically for Taiwanese audiences.”

In Palimpsest Corpus she used projections of solo performances past to create a kaleidoscopic experience of seeing one body dance through time and space. The recorded performances are expertly edited and blended to create a sense of spatial continuity rather than delineated split screens. The recorded dances feature the most virtuosic of Kao’s capabilities, especially in Fenley’s choreography replete with leaps and off-center balances.

Kao’s live performance saw a virtuosity of tone. Whether she was dancing in tandem with a recorded version of herself, skipping lightly across the stage, or cracking open a cold one with the musicians, Jorge Bachmann and Kevin Corcoran, her tonal shifts never made me question if she was losing control of her concept. Rather, it was in the subtle shifting from “task” to “dance” that the concept was most lucid.

Kao cites postmodern dance as both an influence and current practice in her performing. While postmodern has become a catchall term that is overused to the point of meaninglessness, Kao is earnest and specific in her use of the theory’s praxis. The difference between a step and a jump, between a costume and a prop is explored by Kao with alert curiosity, whereas, for many nowadays, the performance of a simple task is laced with detached bemusement, as if the performer were commenting on the action’s context within dance history rather than simply acting.

Palimpsest Corpus ends with projections of maps of Taiwan. The variance in cartographic detail and perspective visualized how easily perceptions shift — elevation as hand drawn lines versus three dimensional contours — and the paramount impact of locating details and perspectives. Pei-Ling Kao embodies the act of locating, of dancing details and perspectives into time and space.

Garth Grimball is the editor of Dance Stories. His writing has been featured in SF Examiner, Dance Media publications, and Life As A Modern Dancer.

https://medium.com/odc-dance-stories/peiling-kao-dances-maps-the-body-through-time-space-f5018f97011a

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