EAST MEETS WEST IN SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS, AT TOUHILL, MARCH 9-10, 2007
Cutting-edge choreographer Shen Wei (WAY) mingles ancient traditions of his native China with radical American contemporary dance to create strange and wondrous works for his company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, presented by Dance St. Louis at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on March 9-10 at 8 p.m.
Images inspired by painting, sculpture, Chinese opera, and calligraphy join with inventive new movements drawn from yoga, martial arts, Chinese acrobatics, and American modern dance. The program features two wildly different works: the angular, frenzied Rite of Spring, set to the two-piano version of Igor Stravinsky's revolutionary score, and the serene, otherworldly Re - , inspired by the spirituality of Tibet, set to chants sung by Buddhist nun Ani Choying Dolma.
Born in Hunan, now based in New York, Shen Wei has soared to world-class status since he founded his company six years ago, ensnaring the imaginations of critics and audiences with his startlingly original works that take dancers, as he says, "to a place where movement hasn't existed yet."
Dance St. Louis Artistic and Executive Director Michael Uthoff will host a free program, Speaking of Dance, in the Touhill's Terrace Lobby at 7:15 p.m. prior to both performances.
A painter, filmmaker, and set designer as well as dancer and choreographer, Shen Wei seeks to invent a unique movement language and visual world for each dance, so he himself creates the costumes, makeup and sets.
Rite of Spring (2003) leaps from eerie stillness to explosions of movement. It takes place on a 42-by-47-foot canvas that Shen Wei painted in black, white and grays with intersecting lines, across which the dancers move like live chess pieces. The music is Igor Stravinsky's two-piano version of the revolutionary score he created for Sergei Diaghiliev's Ballets Russes in 1913. The dance does not, however, follow the original scenario about savage fertility rites in pagan Russia, or any other storyline. Instead, Shen Wei responds purely to the music--its barbed rhythms, wild harmonies, and dynamics that rocket from whispers to snarls.
In contrast, Re - (Part One, 2006) is quiet and contemplative. Shen Wei says that it was inspired by his recent journeys to Tibet, and "is broadly based on the feeling of the land, the people, the religion and the culture."
When the work opens, the stage floor is covered with concentric circles and squares laid out in blue and white confetti, a reference to a mandala, an elaborate pattern created within a circle. In Tibetan tradition, a mandala is "painted" by using colored sand, often by groups of monks as an aid to meditation and a symbol of restoring order and holiness to the earth. Then, as a sign of relinquishing one's belongings and of the impermanence of life, the mandala is broken as soon as it is completed.
The music is Tibetan Buddhist chants sung by Ani Choying Dolma, a Buddhist nun and musician from the Nagi Gompa nunnery in Nepal, who has brought Tibetan chants and feast songs to mainstream audiences through her performances and CDs.
The title of Re - "makes sense for me," says Shen Wei, "because there are so many English words that start with these letters, like return and renew, replace, rethink and so on. People make mistakes in life, but they can always rethink what has been done."
Critics worldwide have hailed Shen Wei as a unique and visionary talent since he established his company in 2000 at the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina. "Poetic, impudent, beautiful and strange," wrote veteran dance critic Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times, "the dances of Shen Wei ... announce the advent of a strikingly original artist who fits into no familiar category."
"There has been much discussion and worry in the dance world about where the new important choreography will come from. Shen Wei delivers an answer," wrote Sarah Kaufman in the Washington Post . "From the other side of the world, from an ancient arts culture of meditative minimalism. From an artist whose life embodies the best of China--intensive early instruction in beauty, harmony and natural wonders--and the worst--state-inflicted punishment. And from a man who has handled the bruising clash of his culture and ours with composure and a powerful renewal of purpose."
Shen Wei's works have often been described as abstract paintings come to life. "His dances are moving paintings, three-dimensional visual experiences," wrote Alexandra Tomalonis in danceviewtimes.com. Nigel Redding, general director of New York's Lincoln Center Festival, said that Shen Wei has "a painter's eye in the sense of covering an entire stage with dancers and with visuals." "Shen Wei wields his performers like a calligrapher's brush in The Rite of Spring, " wrote Jann Perry in the London Observer.
Shen Wei has been commissioned to create new works for the American Dance Festival every year since he founded his company there in 2000. He is the 2004 winner of the Nijinsky Award for Emerging Choreographers. Shen Wei Dance Arts was featured at the Lincoln Center Festival, New York, for three consecutive summers from 2003 to 2005. The company received the 2005 Helpmann Award for Best Ballet or Dance Work, presented by Sydney Festival in Association with Sydney Opera House. The company has toured throughout Europe, Israel, Asia and Australia. In 2007, the company is initiating a five-year residency at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
Now age 39, Shen Wei left China in 1995 as a rising young star frustrated by government restrictions. His complex relationship with his heritage had already begun in his childhood. His parents directed and performed in opera productions in the city of Xian Ying, in the Hunan province of south-central China. When he was 2 years old, the Cultural Revolution swept through the province, sending his parents into the countryside to work alongside the peasants for two years. Unaware of the political turmoil, Shen Wei enjoyed his rural childhood, playing in the rice fields, studying calligraphy and water-color painting.
After the revolution, at age 9, he entered the Hunan Xian Opera's school, and at age 16, joined the company itself. In 1985 he was bowled over by his first experience of modern dance when a Canadian company performed in Beijing. This lead him to co-founding, along with artistic director Yang Mei Qui, China's first contemporary dance company, the Guangdong Modern Dance Company. He was its resident choreographer and principal dancer from 1991 to 1995. But because he had befriended two people visiting from Taiwan, which was forbidden at the time, he was not allowed to go to the U.S. when the Guangdong Modern Dance Company made its American debut in 1991 at the American Dance Festival. In 1995 he resigned from the company and took advantage of a scholarship he had been offered with the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab to move to New York.
His life changed abruptly again in 1999, when he was diagnosed with a heart ailment requiring surgery. While convalescing, he decided to create work that merged his Chinese traditions with his newfound experiences in Western dance, theater, and art, especially the work of abstract, surrealist and expressionist painters .
Shen Wei Dance Arts is sponsored by the Whitaker Foundation.
Tickets are $25-$43/general public, $22-$40/students and seniors. They are available at the Dance St. Louis box office in Grand Center at 3547 Olive St., the Centene Center for Arts and Education. They are also available by calling 314-534-6622 and via the Dance St. Louis website at dancestlouis.org. Handling charges apply to all phone, Internet and outlet sales.
back to 06/07 Season