Three minutes into the performance of Ashley Chen’s dance performance piece Rush, he’s got you very pleasurably scrambling to make sense of it – wanting to rush along with him, wanting to find out where he’s going, wanting even to get there before he gets there for the deviltry of it. Yet Rush is just two guys who begin by standing at opposite corners of a stage area with five old amplifier speakers scattered between them. These last scratch out tiny scraps of ultra-recognizable 20th-century pop hits that sometimes cue mood and sometime cue scraps of performer movement.
At first, like some old bull confused by the trickery of the matador, I swung my head back and forth, trying to think up a narrative strategy to let me charge one then get at the other. Right, back stage, one guy was playing with little bits of projected pop-hit lyrics. Left front stage, the other guy was doing nothing much other than wearing a pale rose polo shirt over blue twill pants. His opposite number wore a lightly lime green polo shirt over blue twill pants. Unable to settle, I fixed center stage and watched both rose and lime from the edge of my bull’s eye. I think I had then understood that although pale rose and light lime were different, they had the same essential value and were central to understanding what happened only when viewed as marginal. Which in itself gives food for general thought.
I watched the tableau unfold. At first, like two unsynchronized pendulum gears, the blue twill pair, spiritually separated by polo shirt, swung past each other. The more they swung, the more they synchronized, the less it mattered which polo-shirt was which. Also, as the guys became more undifferentiated, my visual center filled up with sound and feeling: those scraps of scratchy pop hit that the lime-green polo shirt had been at projecting at the beginning of the performance. I was worn by the contrasting bits of feeling of memory and of feeling of feeling embedded in each scrap, wanted to grab on and hear each through, felt frustrated. Meanwhile, as they came together into my center, my eyes strained to hold on to rose and lime’s intense swinging up to wind down to be wound up again, physical mimicry of my feeling of feeling, wanting and frustration… the Pogo now awake in me glances up from the feeling of memory: We have met the enemy and he is us.
Ashley Chen says that Rush’s variable speeds, the exhaustive swing, go round and crossing of pale rose and light lime, the bits of hit and subtle lighting open a window onto the empty hurry and material need of contemporary life. Surely. But what really is indisputable for me is that as a choreographer, director and performer, Ashley Chen takes performance seriously: Rush is not only an intention, a scenario and a choreography, it is a successful working meditation on drama and performance.
Ashley Chen worked with dance-performance choreographer Thomas Duchâtelet before in 2000 joining the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He founded the troupe Cie Kashyl in 2012, producing “Habits/habits” with Pierre Le Bourgois and, with Philip Connaughton, “Whack!!”and, most recently,”Chance, Space and Time”. A recent work, “Unisson”, premiered at Rencontres chorégraphiques 2018 international dance festival. “Rush” was presented as part of Atelier de Paris-Carolyn Carson’s co-productions of performance creations, so far in 2019 including “Chro no lo gi cal”, movement artist Yasmine Hugonnet’s effort to give human shape to the time time takes, and “Echo de l’infini”, Sylvère Lamotte’s choreography of the dance of past lives within present ones. “Rush” premiered 31 January 2019 with the duo Ashley Chen & Julien Monty, a musical arrangement by Pierre Le Bourgeois with Animaux Vivants and lighting by Eric Wurtz.