Yin Mei Critchell
Yin Mei is a category-defying director/choreographer/visual artist known for creating dance theater works that bridge geographic, technological, artistic, and cultural divides to conjure a unique brand of theatrical magic. Having forged a dance style employing Chinese energy direction and spatial principles as a means of creating contemporary movement theater, Yin Mei has established herself as a choreographer and theater artist uniquely positioned to explore themes of artistic and spiritual significance arising at the intersection between Asian traditional performance and Western contemporary dance.
Yin Mei’s most recent work-inprogress, DreamLetters- REvolution\Simulacrum is an integration of multidimensional action, investigation, recording, and representation in time. A first residency took place at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City in May 2021, Princeton University and the Governor’s Island 2022. Yin Mei’s evening-length dance theater work, Peony Dreams: On the Other Side of Sleep (2019-20) was supported by the National Dance Project and the New England Foundation for the Arts. It premiered at LaMaMa Experimental Dance Festival and toured to the Asolo Theater, Ringling Museum at the start of the global Pandemic in 2020. Farewell my Concubine (2016). Her adaptation of the Chinese literary classic, The Red Dress at Lincoln Center (2015). Yin Mei’s evening-length work DIS/oriented was a collaboration with composer Bora Yoon, playwright Hansol Jang and dancer Fei Bo (National Ballet of China). Supported by the Rockefeller MAP Fund, the work premiered at the Asia Society in New York in 2013. Her evening-length work, Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, was commissioned by the Hong Kong Dance Company and premiered in Hong Kong with 45 dancers in March 2012. The work, widely seen as breaking new ground in using new media, featured innovative “live cinema” staging by noted theater director Jay Scheib. In April 2012, Yin Mei was the choreographer for John Adams’s opera production Nixon In China at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris under the direction of Chen Shi-Zheng. In 2010, Yin Mei choreographed the contemporary ballet A Scent of Timewith media designer Aaron Harrow for the Beijing Dance Academy’s 46 dancer ballet company in 2009. In 2010, her evening- length dance theater work City of Paper, created in collaboration with visual designer Tennessee Rice Dixon, premiered at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival and toured the U.S. thereafter. Nomad: The River, a multi-media dance theater piece created in collaboration with sound and visual designer Christopher Salter, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop (NYLA) in New York City 2005 and was presented at the Contemporary Theater Festival in Shanghai, the Beijing Modern Dance Theater in 2006 and toured the U.S. in 2006-07. Yin Mei’s solo evening, Tea, in collaboration with installation artist Gu Wenda, lighting designer Lea Xiao and musician Ralph Samuelsson, premiered at the Asia Society 2003. Other work includes /Asunder, a multimedia, cross-cultural dance theater work created in collaboration with installation artist Cai Guoqiang and composer Robert Een, which premiered at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York toured eleven U.S. cities throughout 2002 to critical and audience acclaim, starting at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Yin Mei’s first evening-length dance theater work, Empty Tradition/City of Peonies, premiered at the Asia Society in New York in fall 1998 and was presented at the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival in August 1999. Conceived, choreographed and directed by Yin Mei, Empty Tradition/City of Peonies was the product of a year-long collaboration with Indonesian composer Tony Prabowo and prominent visual installation artist Xu Bing and was hailed as a tour de force for Yin Mei in the New York Times.
Yin Mei’s choreography is described by critics in terms that reveal an uncanny, almost magical, effect on audiences: Nomad: The River: “real yet unreal, vivid yet somehow misted in beauty, . . . [the work] brushes our minds with images whose poetry ensnares us, whose enigmas taunt us” (Village Voice). /Asunder: “filled with movement that translates an agony that is repeatedly saved with an embrace” (Dance Insider). Empty Tradition/City of Peonies: “[t]he piece proceeds from one distilled memory to another, not illustrating them but evoking their emotions in passages of shimmering, pensive and abrupt movement” (New York Times). Yin Mei’s choreography has been hailed by critics as “theatrical magic” (New York Times) and as inhabiting “the tremulous space where dreams and memory reside” (Village Voice). Yin Mei herself is described as a “dancer of exquisite lyricism and delicacy” (New York Times) and “a stunning presence, bringing her classical Chinese training and aesthetic into a blend with her adopted Downtown sensibilities with refined grace” (Dance Insider).
Yin Mei has also worked as a creative visual artist. As artist-in- residence at the Baryshnikov Art Center in 2021, Yin Mei created 60 huge paintings and is at work on a film culled from 40 hours of video footage taken during the residency. Her combined performance/visual art work entitled Cursive was exhibited at the Queens Museum, as part of the Biennial in 2006-07, and also at various New York art galleries. In January 2007, Art Review magazine devoted a two-page color spread to Yin Mei creating this work at the James Cohan Gallery in New York. Yin Mei also had a solo exhibition “3000” of her art and performance work at the DeVos Museum, Northern Michigan University, in October 2007 and the Duke university 2008. Yin Mei was one of a number of prominent U.S.-based Chinese-born artists interviewed for NPR’s “Studio 360” program entitled “Overseas Chinese”.
Yin Mei’s choreography has been presented at leading New York dance and performance venues including the City Center Fall for Dance Festival, Lincon Center David Koch Theater, St. John the Divine Cathedral, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Dance Theater Workshop, La Mama ETC., the Asia Society, the Japan Society, Movement Research at Judson Church and the Queens Museum. Her work has been presented multi times at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts LA, the UCLA’s Center for Performing Arts, the Asolo Theater at the Ringling Museum Florida, the Miami Performing Arts Center, the Columbia College Dance Center, the University of California Los Angeles, UMASS-Amherst, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Kohler Arts Center, the University of Arizona, Brown University, Arizona State University, Hamilton College, Trinity College, Bryn Mawr College, Wake Forest University, University of California at Riverside and Bard College. Internationally, her work has been presented at the National Theater of Beijing, the Grant Opera Theater of Nanjing, the Poly Theater at Ningbo and Beijing, China, the Shanghai Contemporary Theater Festival, Beijing Theater for Modern Dance, the Hong Kong Keichong Theatre, Tokyo’s Theater X, the Chikamatsu Festival Japan, the BBB Festival Germany, the Indonesian Dance Festival, the Korea International Dance Festival and the Contemporary Dance Festival West Sumatra, the Jerusalem Museum, etc. She was one of the international choreographers invited to participate in the 50th anniversary of the American Dance Festival.
Yin Mei is a recipient of Fulbright and the Guggenheim Award, her work has been recognized and supported by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation Multi- Arts Production Fund, Doris Duke Fund of the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, Meet The Composer, Music for Dance, Arts International, Greenwall Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Dance Force, Asian Cultural Council, Bossak/Heibron Charitable Foundation, the Asian American Arts Alliance, her research into Chinese ancient philosophy and contemplative practice integrated into her contemporary art making was recognized with a Contemplative Practice Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
She received her B.A. with honors from New York University, M.F.A. from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.