"...powerful...original and fascinating"

8/18/04 performance at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, reviewed by Connell McGrath

Shen Wei Dance Arts
photo: Bruce R. Feeley

Shen Wei Dance Arts is working hard to Make It New, to find something fresh and original to present. As a choreographer and a visual artist, Shen Wei is making dances about spatial relations, composition and structure. As such, his dancers become props in a contemporary art installation. He employs them to convey something other than the human experience, something more elemental from a biology or physics lab, perhaps. He is committed to abstraction, refusing to narrate human interactions or to invest his work with human meanings. As such, his work somewhat resembles Merce Cunningham's, though without the singular emphasis on randomness.

The pieces in this performance at Jacob’s Pillow are from Wei’s newer work. The first of the pieces—Behind Resonance (2001, 2003)—was the most original and striking. Wei choreographs, creates costumes and set and make-up design. Only lighting and music are left to others. Behind Resonance begins before dancers take the stage, before the house lights dim. On entering the Ted Shawn Theatre, the curtain is open and all the side curtains—usually hiding the backstage apparatus and clutter—have been removed. Likewise, there’s no back curtain, and the old barn wall is grandly exposed to view. On the stage are wide, bright white strips of fabric arranged in a broken cross that runs up the back wall. It is as if Wei wants us to see all the mechanics of the theatre, to remind us that that’s where we are. He strips the artifice from it and starts there.

Shen Wei Dance Arts
photo: Bruce R. Feeley

In a word, Behind Resonance is sculptural. The movement is slow, with the dancers repeatedly holding their positions. The spatial relation between the dancers, theater, even costume, is important, as are the poses that they hold. The costumes are sheaths of velvet with wide skirts—men bare-chested, and women with close-fitting bodices. The skirts are longer than the dancers’ legs, and trail behind them on the floor; the dancers at times walk or glide on the material, stretching it to create shapes with their legs. For the most part, the legs aren’t visible, giving the dancers a disembodied quality. There are some powerful and original movements—and non-movements—in this piece, and despite its solemnity and slow pace, it conveys a powerful charge to the audience. While the dance is slow, there is original and striking movement in this work, things from a new vocabulary of movement, and Shen Wei delivers on his high ambition to make it new.

During the long intermission, the curtain remains open and the audience gets to watch as the white cross is removed from the floor of the stage and replaced by a blue-gray canvas with fold lines and subtle swirls. We watch the stage hands duct-tape down the canvas, and do a dance of their own over it as they do their best to remove all ripples from the surface. They put back up the back curtain, but leave the side curtains off. Again, this doesn’t seem coincidental, and Wei must have a reason for this “exposing” of the inner workings. This suspicion is confirmed by how the next piece begins (or did it begin as soon as Behind Resonance ended?). As the audience chats and finds their seats, the dancers come to the edge of the stage one-by-one, staying in the wings but still visible. The talk dies down as we watch them gradually collect along the stage’s periphery. When the audience finally goes silent and the dancers are all in place, they begin to fast walk out onto the stage one at a time and stop. House lights are still on which has the effect of including the audience in the piece. All dancers gradually come out onto the stage, and then start shifting around the stage. It is like molecules influencing each other—one moves, stops and sets another in motion. The dancers are doing a fast walk like automatons, expressionless, arms at sides, only the lower part of their legs moving.

At last, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (also the name of the dance) begins playing and the house lights dim. The recording is an excellent interpretation for four-hand piano by Fazil Say. Shen Wei again comes to the theatre setting a high mark for himself. Many great choreographers have reinvented The Rite of Spring, not a few embarrassing themselves in the process. Wei aquits himself well here, due in large part to his refusal to “tell the story” of spring’s emergence. In his liner notes, he writes “in keeping with my interest in abstraction, it is only the melodic and rhythmic qualities of the music, rather than the story it tells, which inform the choice of movement vocabulary.” This “musicality” brings to mind Mark Morris’s artistic agenda, and though the movement is very different from Morris, Shen Wei shows the same gift for expressing music through dance movement. Shen Wei’s version of The Rite of Spring is very well done, though the costumes are a bit severe—they look like the somber old clothes we might don to finally clean out the attic!

Shen Wei Dance Art’s work is powerful, with some original and fascinating elements. Wei suffers a bit from taking himself too seriously, and hasn’t yet found a way to bring light-heartedness to his work, at least not the works he presents at the Pillow. Nonetheless, the work is accessible enough for the general public with many thought-provoking and memorable aspects.