At a table tennis tournament last month on the Lower East Side, something funny was going on. Not just the swiveling head of a scorekeeper as he tracked the back-and-forth of a match, nor the close fixation on the ball that made a player’s body swoop and scoop in a serve. The nagging questions were broader. Why was the tournament on a theater stage? And why were some of the tables so small?
Both were clues that the tournament, at Abrons Arts Center, was tied to a performance. The choreographer Cherrie Yu had organized the event in connection with her work “Daily Diversions,” which juxtaposes table tennis and postmodern dance and runs this week in the same theater from Thursday to Saturday.
Those quarter-size Ping-Pong tables can be merged to make half-size or full-size ones, and that’s a pretty good metaphor for what “Daily Diversions” does: It takes Ping-Pong apart and puts it back together. With a multigenerational cast that mixes table tennis players with dancers, Yu draws attention to the formal and rhythmic properties of the sport. Through narration, she also delves into its history, both broadly and in the lives of cast members, including herself.
Yu, 31, trained with a table tennis coach for a few years as a child in China, where the sport was ubiquitous and her mother had been a champion player in college. But it had dropped out of her life until she moved to New York in 2021. Happening upon a game in Herald Square, she watched for a while until someone handed her a paddle. “And it all came back,” she said, “the muscle memory from when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, the control I forgot I had.”
Yu was trying to figure out a life as a choreographer and dancer in New York, as well as her relationship to the largely white and Euro-American history of postmodern dance. Ping-Pong reminded her of the family and country she had left behind when she moved to the United States for college in 2013. It introduced her to a new social circle and became part of her daily practice.
She would play in the morning and then take a class in Merce Cunningham dance technique. “Those two things started to converge in my brain and body,” she said. Relearning table tennis from a Taiwanese elder, Yu gained physical confidence and an analytical perspective that she could carry into dance class. “And then when I did a Cunningham exercise, I felt more like myself,” she said.
Since she was constantly thinking about Ping-Pong through dance and vice versa, she decided to create a performance piece about the intersection. In 2023, she choreographed a 10-minute work for an art gallery in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, incorporating three elders from the local table tennis community and a smaller-than-normal table designed by Matt Shalzi for the gallery’s tight confines (a predecessor of the modular tables Shalzi created for the Abrons Arts Center performances).
“A lot of performances are one and done,” Yu said, “but I felt we needed to do it again and bring in more people.” She invited professional dancers and then professional Ping-Pong players, which allowed the work to become more complex.
The latest iteration of “Daily Diversions” includes some conventional table tennis matches but also atypical ones: played with hands instead of paddles or with paddles and hands or the level-up addition of an extra ball. The players twirl between bounces or continually rotate positions. Shalzi’s tables are assembled and disassembled. During some games, balls bounce across tables separated like islands.
All these defamiliarizing variations, alongside dancier bits that abstract the motions, draw attention to the mechanics of the sport. There’s the seesaw motion that connects the bodies of two players facing off, the differently angled lines drawn by a forehand-to-forehand exchange versus a forehand-to-backhand one. You might notice the relationships between power and placement, arch and drive, speed and spin. You might sense how the lulling iambic rhythm of a rally — ping pong, ping pong — makes the cobra-strike acceleration of a winner shot all the more startling.
At the Museum of Modern Art in August, during a performance marathon curated by the artist-run performance space Pageant, Yu paired table tennis with Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of Cygnets” from “Swan Lake.” But “Daily Diversions” has no music other than that made by hollow plastic balls, wooden tables and paddles of wood, sponge and rubber. Sound, after all, is in the name Ping-Pong. Narrated sections, tracing the sport’s history as an offshoot of tennis in late 19th-century England, list some alternatives, mostly onomatopoetic, like pim-pam, clip-clap and whiff-waff. (The history doesn’t mention “Marty Supreme”: Yu hasn’t seen the film.)
“Cherrie is a formalist at heart,” said the dancer Ariel Herrera. “She’s very rigorous.”
Herrera, 66, played a little table tennis as a child in the Philippines, but for him, Yu’s show is more a return to dance performance after a hiatus of around 30 years. In the late 1980s, he was a physically daring choreographer described as “a young talent to be followed” in a 1988 New York Times review. But he “got sidetracked,” he said, as he helped build an L.G.B.T.Q. human rights program at Amnesty International. Last year, he started attending dance classes again, which is where he met Yu.
“I love being surrounded by these younger dancers,” he said. “It’s helping me as I try to remember what’s in my body.”
An Kong, 22, has been playing table tennis for most of his life. He moved to New York from Hong Kong three years ago to go to college and met Yu the first time he played Ping-Pong here. Now she has him not just practicing his sport in a dance production, but also dancing in it. “For me, playing table tennis is just about myself,” he said. “But Cherrie is always telling us that we have to feel each other. We’re a team, and it’s like we have to win the game together.”
In a chapbook Yu made about “Daily Diversions,” she writes that Ping-Pong feels like “the ultimate form of abstraction — an exchange of energy that starts and ends with nothing.” But she is equally concerned with the social aspects of both sport and art making. She conceived the tournament at Abrons as a kind of invitation into her work.
With “Daily Diversions,” she wrote, she wanted to make a world in which Ping-Pong players and dancers could “move side by side and relate to each other.” That world is her world, her life in New York.
