Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College will continue its 60th anniversary season by partnering with Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company for its second annual Lunar New Year Celebration.
In the First China International Dance Festival in Kunming , Yunan, the China Dance Association presented choreographer Nai-Ni Chen and her company its most prestigious honor for companies not based in China, the Golden Lotus Award. The group will take Brooklyn Center’s audiences on a visually delightful, culturally rich tour of the 3,000-year-old Chinese civilization. This year's celebration honors The Year of the Sheep, a year of peace, love, and woolly gentleness according to the Chinese calendar.
The repertoire for the performance will include "Double Lions Welcoming Spring," a version of the popular Lion Dance; "Gu Ze Yung Ge," a dance from the Han people in Northeast China that incorporates fans, handkerchiefs, and drums in a celebration of the harvest; the rhythmic "Hubei Coin Stick Dance," originally done by street performers in the Hubei province; and the famous "Dragon Dance," symbolizing imperial power and nature's grace. The Company will also perform an excerpt from Peach Flower Landscape, a dance drama portraying a peaceful agricultural community living in perfect harmony with the land, commissioned in 1995 by the Lincoln Center Institute.
Accompanying the dancers with be the Chinese Music Ensemble of New York, the oldest larges and only full-scale orchestra in the Americas. The ensemble will incorporate tradition instruments such as a pear-shaped lute and hammered dulcimer. Musical interludes will include "Song of the Mountains," a solo performed by Yueqin Chen on the ruan, a plucked-string instrument similar to a lute, and "A Parting Tune," an ensemble piece inspired by the poetry of Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei.
The performance will take place on Jan. 25 at 3 p.m. Tickets can be purchased here.
