The space is dark, crisscrossed by white elastic suspended from the ceiling and pulled taut to every corner. Although I’ve never seen this piece before, something about a black void with spiderwebs sectioning the air into repeating randomized patterns looks familiar. This is the effect of Shannon Yu’s work. A texture courses through all of it: an energy animates it, maintaining an internal consistency through many iterations, like veins inside muscles.
Sha enters, walking slowly, dragging a silver blanket. Images pour rapidly across the back wall in a layered video collage: sky clouds Sha’s face a path through the woods lines of Mandarin characters writing and erasing themselves hot pot smiling cartoons A grating, sucking, gasping sound score created by Qiujiang Levi Lu charges the air with discordant noise. The layers of information are already overwhelming, abrasive, dense, chunky. The general effect is of a bardo. This is a place where we are waiting: a spiritual plateau, an airport, the inside of a brain experiencing the ego death of an acid trip or deep meditation. Sha is still for a while. We are all waiting.
Something shifts and the sound score intensifies. Syllables of bastardized Mandarin slur and sludge into gravelly reverberations. And Sha begins to move. Swift hands carve the dark air in a series of inexplicable gestures, spare and serious. Although we are watching, this might not be for us. A preparation or incantation; a calligraphic specificity. The images continue swirling past, a montage of subjectivity. Steaming bowl of soup Sha’s body Sha’s face path through the woods characters writing and erasing themselves
As I’m watching, I’m considering the bardo. It’s more of a sensation of betweenness or void-in-which-things-transform than an actual place. In Tibetan Buddhism, the term refers to the space between living and dying, an astral plane. Literally translated, it means “between two.” David Mancuso structured his DJ sets at his famous Loft parties to include three bardos, mirroring the stages of an LSD experience. The first, he says on his website, is “calm, and perfect.” The second is “a circus” and the third provides a transition into the world outside. Something about the scrolling free-associated images, the single body, and the dark, loud space indicates there will be a journey akin to this.
Just as the sound score overwhelms me with jagged rasps and gulps, Sha grabs the white tape and pulls. The moment we’ve all been waiting for. Navigating the space like a spider, Shannon weaves poses out of thin air and morphs from bodybuilder to boyband star to Trisha Brown and back. Sha creates a portal; the images stop, the light turns pink, and a familiar beat starts smoothing my eardrums into the pulse pulse pulse of a cipher. Shannon is shadowboxing now, throwing shapes, every muscle taut and angled at an imaginary challenger. The audience whistles, giving Sha back some energy. We’re all journeying until Sha is done.
And Sha isn’t finished with us yet. The beat becomes a track, and the movements become savage animal crawls in slow motion, frigid pops and waves and isolations that stop on a dime. Then there’s the passages of kung fu arrow steps and punches, movements drawn from a daily practice of self defense. This is the circus, and Sha is the lion in the center of the ring. This part of the piece is familiar, and better in context: I stage managed it at Performance Mix last year, so I’m as gleeful as a kid watching a ringmaster do his tricks. Sweat is dripping from Sha’s shoulders and the audience is hollering and then there is no more music and Matt Morris’s lighting design makes a cave again.
Leaving the bardo calls for transformation. Sha fills a sponge with black ink and scrawls down sha’s chest, arm, leg, thigh… the ink drips in imaginary characters, abstract and intense. The body becomes a page, a site for inscription, a blank slate. The final gesture of the piece makes this the apotheosis of Sha’s work so far. Previously, Sha used paper as a set piece and partner, rolls and rolls of white paper embellished with massive squiggles of black ink. This time, Sha is the canvas. The silence echoes. We watch the ink drip, eager for the message; perhaps something was lost in translation, or perhaps it was the feeling of the thing. Whatever Sha wrote—on the body, with the body, into our imaginations— lands between at least two worlds.
Choreographed and performed by Shannon Yu 余香儒
Musician Quijiang Levi Lu
Video artist Jan Suphitcha
Rehearsal assistant Maddie Hopfield
Lighting designer Matt Morris
Project manager Mattie McGarey
Triskelion team:
Executive director Rachel Mckinstry
Director of Production Anna Wotring
Director of Operations & Marketing Miriam Rose
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