Hong Kong troupe confronts ‘Orientalism’

City Contemporary Dance Company of Hong Kong has a tiger by the tail in its one-act 2002 piece “365 Ways of Doing and Undoing Orientalism.”

Co-choreographers Willy Tsao, Xing Liang and Sang Jijia want to confront the stereotypes of traditional Asian culture and show how they exploit simplistic notions of the Mystic East. A tricky, needful ambition. But the Hong Kong three are not nearly tough-minded enough to succeed and are quickly seduced by the very cliches they ought to be deconstructing. As a result, the piece degenerates into an endless anthology of exotic specialties: 365 ways of renewing Orientalism.

At the first of three local performances, Thursday at the Watercourt in California Plaza, the choreographic charades locked 14 superbly trained modern dancers into hard-sell diversions with fans, flags, swords, sleeves, banners, parasols, lion and dragon masks, pheasant-plume headdresses, Suzie Wong slit skirts.

The choreographers often recontextualize their source techniques through atypical music -- brooding ritualism, assaultive rock ‘n’ roll -- but that isn’t enough.

It isn’t enough either when, one by one, the cast members appear in modern dress at the end to deposit their props on the stage, gaze glumly at them and walk away.

All across Asia in recent years, choreographers have tackled the subject of oppressive, trivialized traditions with much greater pertinence -- in Indonesia, for example, where you could see a piece showing a traditional Javanese dancer on life support, kept alive only to amuse the tourists. Or India, where you could find radical updates of classical dance, purged of antique sentimentality and pictorialism.

Closer to home, Donald Byrd has put African American dancers in blackface to dismantle some of the tainted showbiz lore of our own culture. City Contemporary Dance Company offers nothing remotely as incisive. Performance skills, yes, but even here the work gets in the way.

For example, Xing Liang looks like a star dancer of inexhaustible energy and fabulous pliancy. But who wants to watch him swirling a fake hank of hair, or flopping aimlessly on a bed flanked by Red Guards?

Tsao and colleagues structure “365 Ways” as a four-seasons suite, but the organization proves arbitrary. After intermission, Tsao’s nine-part 1994 “China Wind/China Fire” reveals the same weakness. The best suites are more than choreographic shopping bags overstuffed with whims -- but that’s what Tsao (the company artistic director) deems fit for export, and the results deserve their own satiric deconstruction.

The weight of the past is again heavily evident in “Wind/Fire,” especially in the ritualistic ensemble sequences that open and close it. Antique Peking Opera music helps reinforce a sense of something grim and even eerie arising from collective memories, and that feeling may be the most distinctive effect created by the entire piece.

Before long, the cast strips out of white robes down to contemporary street and party wear, and we get an aimless parade of genre scenes and character divertissements: a rather sadistic flirtation for Joann Chou and Dominic Wong, or an increasingly desperate foray into celebrity by Noel Pong, or group scenes depicting social turmoil.

The work can be seen as a reflection of the clash in Hong Kong between garish extremes, and perhaps too as a comment on what Tsao regards as the territory’s descent into corruption and violence before the mainland Chinese takeover. It boasts another showcase of Xing Liang’s extraordinary prowess just before the end and a prayer for the return of spirituality.

But so much of it plays like one of those heavy-handed (and -footed) Soviet-era put-downs of capitalist decadence (the nightclub scenes in the Bolshoi Ballet’s “Golden Age,” for instance) that it seems to belong in a museum of Communist art, not in the repertory of any company with the word “contemporary” in its name.

Fine dancing kept us watching the Bolshoi, of course, and it keeps us watching these exemplary Hong Kong modernists, but with ever-diminishing satisfaction.

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City Contemporary Dance Company

Where: Watercourt, California Plaza, 350 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.

When: 8 tonight

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 687-2159