The Han Tang Yuefu Music and Dance Ensemble

About a millennium ago in China, as the Song Dynasty was swallowing up the Tang, the statesman Han Xizai realised his political career was over and retreated to his mansion for a life of debauchery. When word spread of nights where “guests mixed with ladies, shouting in wild excitement”, as one chronicler put it, Emperor Li Yu sent the court painter Gu Hongzhong to gather intelligence. Voilà “The Feast of Han Xizai”, a painting with enough intrigue and side plots to make Gu Imperial China’s answer to Bruegel. Now hanging in the Beijing Palace Museum, the detailed, delectable 11-foot scroll has spawned imitations and tributes down the centuries.

Ho-wen Hsiao (centre) with the Han Tang Yuefu dancers

The latest is a dreamily slow, meticulously constructed dramatisation by the Taiwanese music and dance troupe Han Tang Yuefu (at the Joyce until Sunday as part of Carnegie Hall’s bicoastal festival Ancient Paths, Modern Voices). Like the painting, the dance forgoes the “shouting” for ladies singing, dancing, fluting and plucking the lute, and men drumming, flirting and, mainly, watching. Unlike the painting, no beds with rumpled sheets frame the circumspect action to hint at where it all is leading or has led. Nor do several mini-dramas transpire at once, in that loose, improvisatory rhythm of a promiscuous night that will inevitably bleed into morning. Rather, Han Tang turns “The Feast” into an extended ritual, with one part discretely following another.

The stagey approach damps the mood of possibility but doesn’t destroy it. And it has little impact on what would always have been formal, such as the musical numbers. Mix the stir-and-beat rhythms of an ancient raga with the dissonance of Beijing opera, and you come close to the captivating idiom of the ancient Nanguan music that the lady flautists and lutenists play, each with her own kind, and the singers sing. Music is the show’s star.

But Han Xizai’s consorts – particularly the head concubine (Ho-wen Hsiao) – aren’t far behind. Above tiny, gliding steps, their heads bob like a marionette’s: they seem always to be yielding. At one point, they couple up – the men’s robes in a rainbow of browns, the women’s gowns in dusky rose, pearl grey, turquoise and peach. (Kam-tim Yip, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame, did the lovely costumes and sombre set.) Each man stands behind his lady and mirrors her delicate gestures. He borrows one of her cymbals or fine rattles and makes music with her.