10/10/09 + 10/11/09 The Crane Wife: Dance Performance @ Pier 66 (26–27 St)

October 10 + 11, Sat. + Sun. at 1pm, 3pm

Pier 66

Hudson River (between 26th and 27th Sts)
Chelsea, NYC

(212) 627-2020

Cost: Free

For ages 6 and up

In The Crane Wife, choreographer Caron Eule and composer, jazz violinist and erhu player Meg Okura collaborate in this modernization of an ancient Japanese fable.

http://www.ceuledance.org

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This is the basic story from wikipedia.org:

The Crane Wife is an old Japanese tale. While there are many variations of the tale, a common version is that a poor man finds an injured crane on his doorstep (or outside with an arrow in it), takes it in and nurses it back to health. After he releases the crane, a woman appears at his doorstep with whom he falls in love and marries. Because they need money, his wife offers to weave wondrous clothes out of silk that they can sell at the market, but only if he agrees never to watch her making them. They begin to sell them and live a comfortable life, but he soon makes her weave them more and more. Oblivious to his wife’s diminishing health, his greed increases. He eventually peeks in to see what she is doing to make the silk she weaves so desirable. He is shocked to discover that at the loom is a crane plucking feathers from her own body and weaving them into the loom. The crane, seeing him, flies away and never returns.