On the plateau, the technician, who wore a controller around his neck the size of a 12-pack, flipped a switch and hoisted Xavier aloft: 15 feet, 30 feet, 50 feet.PeiJu Chien-Pott is an internationally acclaimed contemporary dance artist from Taiwan who has been described by the Brooklyn Rail as "one of the greatest living modern dancers". “We thought very carefully about designing the show so that it could have a life after the Shed,” he said, adding that producers from London, Paris, Beijing and Berlin were among those expected to attend its four-week run. (Unlike “Spider-Man,” the show is being presented by a nonprofit.) Poots estimated that the stage had cost around $650,000 to construct, money that, along with the rest of a budget that he said was in the low millions, had been offset by fund-raising, and which he hoped to recoup with ticket sales and rentals to other theaters and presenting organizations. Below him were live fire pits capable of shooting flames, and water spouts that could flood and drain the plateau on demand. For Xavier and the rest of the ensemble, learning to fly in the harnesses was the last - and riskiest - piece of the puzzle.ĭirectly above him was a ring-shaped platform suspended 80 feet in the air, from which he and six other performers were to dive in a dramatic rescue scene. It was the first, and only, week of full rehearsals for the show’s three aerial sequences, which, for logistical reasons, hadn’t been possible outside of the Shed. ![]() On the plateau in the Shed’s McCourt Theater, just over a week before “Dragon Spring” was scheduled to open, a technician gave Xavier final instructions. ![]() June 12 | 10 Days before previews begin Taking Flight “I’m hoping the physicality and the energy will carry us through.” “We were trying to find people who could do the martial arts and the acting and the singing, but we failed, in a way,” Mr. That meant less time to practice other aspects of their performances. He decided to narrow his focus to the dance world - largely hip-hop, modern, and classical - figuring he would get an actor’s stage presence and a martial artist’s core strength and agility in the bargain.īut mastering the fight choreography, even for a cast with extraordinary physical discipline, took longer than expected. But the musical theater actors he saw didn’t make believable fighters, and the martial artists couldn’t pull off the requisite acting and dancing. He spent more than a year on casting, searching for performers who could match the show’s multidisciplinary ambitions. But lately I’ve been feeling so much hostility, and that kind of subconsciously went into the plot.” “When I came to this country in the late ’80s, it was cool to be different. “I wanted to create a modern myth about immigrants in America and how they survive,” Mr. Though wrapped in pop packaging, the core themes of “Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise” - geographical and spiritual dislocation, hybridized identity and the weight of heritage - are deeply personal. The last such high-profile, high-flying attempt was the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” a notoriously unwieldy enterprise that left a cautionary legacy of comic one-liners, broken hearts and sunk capital when it closed in 2014. It was developed as a kind of proof of concept for the new building, engineered to dazzle audiences with name-brand artists, staggering physical scale and blockbuster pyrotechnics not found anywhere else in a city well steeped in audacious spectacle.īut achieving liftoff won’t be easy. “Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise” is his most ambitious undertaking yet. ![]() In those roles, he commissioned an opera that paired the artist Marina Abramovic with Willem Dafoe, and a ballet, adapted from a Jonathan Safran Foer book, that featured a score by the electronic music producer Jamie xx and choreography by Wayne McGregor. Poots, one of the contemporary art world’s most exuberant and prolific matchmakers, served as the artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory and the founder of the Manchester International Festival in England.
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