H.T. Chen, who blended Eastern and Western influences in his choreography, and who along with his spouse, Dian Dong, established the Chen Dance Center, a cultural hub in New York’s Chinatown for greater than 40 years, died on June 12 in Manhattan. He was 74.
Ms. Dong mentioned the trigger was lung most cancers.
Mr. Chen, who was born in Shanghai, got here to the United States in 1971 and, quickly after graduating from the Juilliard School in 1976, fashioned H.T. Chen & (*74*), a modern-dance firm that has carried out often in New York and toured extensively. Mr. Chen studied Chinese classical dance and the use of acrobatics, martial arts and dance in Chinese opera earlier than arriving in New York, and at Juilliard he realized about Western trendy dance methods.
“I combined them together to come out with my own movement vocabulary,” he defined in a 2013 video interview.
Mr. Chen, who earned a grasp’s diploma in dance schooling at New York University in 1978, drew on his personal heritage and on Asian American historical past in lots of of his works. For a 2015 piece, “South of Gold Mountain,” he spent three years accumulating tales and pictures of Chinese immigrants who had settled in the southern United States, some of whom labored on cotton plantations.
A signature work he developed in the mid-Nineteen Nineties, “Transparent Hinges,” sought to seize the immigrant expertise at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, the place tons of of 1000’s of immigrants, most from China, have been processed in the first half of the final century.
When his dance firm carried out the work in Chicago in 1999, Sid Smith, dance critic of The Chicago Tribune, was significantly struck by the closing moments.
“Figures young, old, Asian and non-Asian,” he wrote, “come out and join the dancers to form a tableau of a diverse, entrenched immigrant community, walking slowly toward the audience with an air of determination, survival and belonging.”
In 1980 Mr. Chen and Ms. Dong opened the Chen Dance Center on Mulberry Street in Chinatown as a house for the dance troupe and a dance schooling program that has provided courses and labored extensively in metropolis faculties. In 1988 they added a theater at the website, a former public college the place generations of immigrants had been educated.
Reviewing a dance present there in 1989, Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times known as the house “a place where theatrical magic seems about to happen,” and over the years it hosted numerous performances — not solely dance, but in addition puppet exhibits and different multicultural occasions.
In January 2020 a hearth destroyed the complicated, which additionally housed numerous group organizations and the archives of the Museum of Chinese in America. The troupe has since carried out in different areas, together with outdoor and, since the pandemic set in, the middle has provided courses and college packages just about.
Ms. Dong mentioned the middle hopes to rebuild; the metropolis has earmarked millions of {dollars} for the website, although particular plans for it are in flux.
Ms. Dong mentioned her husband’s work, on the stage and in faculties, served a significant function.
“Because H.T. Chen focused much of his creations on the stories of Chinese in the Americas, these works are important for enabling students to understand the contributions of Chinese in the building of America,” she mentioned by electronic mail. “When guided to look deeper into the culture, students begin to view Asians not as the ‘alien other’ but as their friends, neighbors and colleagues.”
Hsueh-Tung Chen was born on June 23, 1947, to Chiang and Hsian Yuan Ming Chen, and raised in Taiwan. He preferred to attract and paint, he mentioned, and his mother and father thought he may turn into an architect, however he was extra focused on motion.
He studied dance at the College of Chinese Culture in Taiwan earlier than coming to New York. At Juilliard he met Ms. Dong, a fellow scholar. Martha Hill, director of the college’s dance division, requested her to be his translator. They married in 1975.
Before beginning his personal troupe, Mr. Chen choreographed for and carried out at La MaMa in New York, and that group gave his dance troupe a house earlier than its transfer to Mulberry Street.
When he took his dance firm on the street, Mr. Chen was identified for enhancing the performances with explanatory lectures and demonstrations aimed at folks not accustomed to trendy dance. As The Cincinnati Enquirer put it in 2000, when he introduced a night he known as “Eye of the Beholder” to the University of Cincinnati, “He wants to assure audiences that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Mr. Chen won’t tell you how to look at modern dance,” the newspaper added, “but will offer help in what to look for.”
In an interview with the newspaper, he defined his reasoning.
“I feel that people in a community don’t have a chance to touch modern dance,” he mentioned. “Maybe they have a local studio with tap dance or clogging or ballet, but not modern.”
In addition to his spouse, Mr. Chen, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by two daughters, Yeeli and Evelyn Chen, and three siblings, Hsueh-Ping Chen, June Lee and Winnie Ching.
In the 2000 interview, Mr. Chen spoke about why so many of his works centered on historical past and cultural heritage.
“I think it’s very important as an individual,” he mentioned, “that you know who you are and where you come from.”
