A fresh way to handle dance

Chinese dancer Liu Yan performs in the production Handling Hands, which premiered at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing on July 6. LI XIAOCAO/FOR CHINA DAILY

Sino-Swiss production discovers new creativity in physical limitations, pushing the boundaries of art, Cheng Yuezhu reports.

As dancers, Liu Yan and Alessandro Schiattarella come from different backgrounds — Liu, born and raised in China, specializes in traditional Chinese dance, while Schiattarella, who comes from Switzerland, is trained in ballet.

Yet in a new dance theater production, Handling Hands, staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing on July 6 and 7, they joined hands, a motif key to both their personal and creative journeys.

Schiattarella received ballet training when he was young, but since the age of 15, he has been affected by Hirayama disease, a neurological disorder that gradually weakens the muscles in the hands.

The disorder hinders the performance of certain hand gestures required in ballet. For some time, he tried to conceal the deterioration by taping his hands up, and continued to perform onstage.

"I was good enough to stay, but my hands could not keep up with my other talents. I had this clash between what my body could do and what it could not do in ballet. This slowly made me realize that these challenges can be very heavy in the long term. From then on, I tried to detach for a moment from the canons of beauty in ballet," he says.

Schiattarella began to face the weakness in his hands through dance productions, notably Altrove+, a solo dance he performed earlier this year in Beijing, which integrates choreographic elements centered on his hands.

The seed for the Sino-Swiss production Handling Hands germinated in May 2023, when Ge Huichao, founder of Beijing Body On&On Cultural Exchange Center, took a trip to Europe.

In 2019, Ge established the annual Luminous Festival, which centers on inclusive arts and organizes lectures, forum discussions, stage productions and screenings to promote inclusiveness and equality.

Upon learning about Schiattarella, Ge immediately thought of Liu. Inspired by the similar changes to their lives, she envisioned a dance project that would connect them.

An acclaimed classical Chinese dancer, Liu was chosen as lead dancer for a performance during the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, but an accident during a rehearsal resulted in spinal injuries.

Hand dancing became Liu's new form of expression, and after finishing a doctoral degree, she became a professor at the Beijing Dance Academy. Her research includes the hand movements in classical Chinese dance, as well as their relationship to Buddhist mudras (symbolic hand gestures).

"Over the past 16 years, as I have started to reexamine dance, I feel that my perception has broadened. I still find traditional Chinese dance extremely beautiful, but there are other elements in dance that are more encompassing, powerful, and possess a different quality," Liu says.

"Another insight is that a new dimension of my life has opened up. While I used to focus solely on performing, I have now also begun to create, teach and research."

When the two dancers first met, they jotted their interests down on paper in an attempt to find common directions to explore as part of a collaborative production.

"The topic of hands was there from almost the first moment, because Liu Yan wrote two books about hands, and I created work about hands that was also presented here in China. This was our first point of connection, and was very strong," Schiattarella says.