Monday, August 13, 2007

Su-Feh's Seattle Review

Last week, Su-Feh taught her class, Unifying Body, Breath & Imagination, at the Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance & Improvisation (SFADI).

She also performed an excerpt of her new solo, The Whole Beast, and here's what Sandra Kurtz at the Seattle Weekly had to say:

"Lee Su-Feh, in an exquisite excerpt from her solo, The Whole Beast, tackled multiple issues of meaning and translation, cultural displacement, the relationship between practice and skill, and the economic uncertainty of a dance career, all the time linking these ideas to dancing. As she slid through a long sequence of poses that seemed to combine martial arts and ballet, she murmured simple greetings in French and English. As her tempo increased, the words fractured into syllables and the shapes became erratic until the increased tension and density exploded with a "Fuck!" This led to a discussion of translation (she needed to know the French equivalent of "fuck" for an upcoming performance in France); she batted the options back and forth, like a solo game of Ping-Pong, which in turn morphed into a lament over the high cost of physical therapy and the ironic disconnect between the freedom of dancing and its physical toll ("Joy is the source of all my pain"). Su-Feh is small and fierce, and though it wasn't clear on a single viewing how much of her work was set and how much improvised, she was clearly in charge of the entirety, and of us, as we were swept up in her stories."