LILY CAI CHINESE DANCE COMPANY.

LILY CAI CHINESE DANCE COMPANY YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS THEATER, SAN FRANCISCO NOVEMBER 6-7, 1998

It turns out that perspective can be brutal. In the formality of the Yerba Buena Theater, the sweet, shadowy world of Lily Cai, with its unthreatening mystery and hopeful fusions, suddenly felt obvious and contrived. Just last season, in Theater Artaud (a smaller venue), her strengths as a choreographer and director were far more apparent than her flaws. But here, it was as though a magnifying glass had been thrust in front of our noses, and the weaknesses of Cai's work were glaring.

Few things from last season had changed dramatically for the November concert. There was a premiere that, although larger in scale than her other works, remained true to her aesthetic. A new dancer had joined the company during the summer, and the company's new configuration hadn't meshed fully. But none of these changes ruffled the waters very much. What did were differences in place, sight lines, and expectations at Yerba Buena. They not only displaced the dances, they swamped them, making Cai's concert a potent lesson in how the setting can rearrange the terms for understanding a work.

Set to the melancholic yearning of the fourth movement of Mahler's Symphony No. 5, Candelas seemed like a sentimental, sometimes beautiful, dance of candlelight last season. Six dancers moved about in the dark with a flame in each hand, arranging themselves in Shiva-like patterns or interweaving horizontally across the stage. A woman ceremoniously arched over her passe, or bent backward in a yoga posture, and a certain meditative beauty accumulated between the symphony and the light. That the beauty was decorative and fleeting didn't matter when one was close to the lights and looked down into the darkness from bleacher seats. The candlelight mesmerized the audience. But in the medium-sized Yerba Buena Theater, looking straight onto the stage, the spatial designs appeared painfully rudimentary rather than modest, and, against the Mahler, the tone of the dance turned turgid.

This was also the fate of Begin From Here (1996), in which Cai fused the traditional, such as the naturalistic or heroic use of fabric, with the Western focus on the individual. Cai's premiere, Southern Girl, came nearer the concert-hall terms needed for Yerba Buena thanks to on-stage playing by the Alexander Quartet (even if Gang Situ's score sounded derivative) and a bold set design by Matthew Antaky. But the elegant decor and grand sound ultimately gave the impression of padding around a thin dance. With their heads inside paper lanterns or their faces encircled by big crimped collars, dancers careened this way and that. On top of a larger boulderlike form a lone dancer snaked her arms. And at the finale a beautiful but heavy-handed rain of red leaves fell. Who was the Southern Girl? It was impossible to tell.

Cai is not the first choreographer to suffer aesthetically in the rise to a more mainstream venue. Over the course of the evening it became clear that the box theater cruelly demanded of her work a sophistication that wasn't there. The small flaws of a foot bent diffidently, a head missing the proper arc, and rhythms out of sync appeared as defects; whereas in the intimacy of last year's smaller space such flaws appeared more effectively as celebrations of human variation. Because of the folk basis of Cai's dances, this seemed apt--the dances weren't finished objects as much as contemporary samples from an ancient stream of dance tradition

Next to the Yerba Bueno Theater is the Forum, a black-box performance space. Had Cai set her work in that less-stringent setting, perhaps she might have found the tone she needed for her humble works to be humbly viewed.