Shen Wei Dance Arts (#1)

Shen Wei Dance Arts performed at ADF June 18-20. The company presented all three parts of the Re- series--three dances inspired by the choreographer's travels. I've written about each dance; here's section 1.

Re- (Part I)

The stage lights fade up slowly, a sky of clouds and light on the backdrop, a mandala onstage composed of shards of colored paper. The bits of paper do not seem sharp, however, but soft, delicate—petals, perhaps, or drops of water.

The eight dancers enter the world of the dance, moving mostly in unison or in small groups, shuffling with soft knees across the stage. Their feet disrupt small puffs of paper, like silt on an ocean floor. The dancers move, too, as if through water; slow and smooth, they stretch and flow, spiral and reach. The movement has a strong circularity—familiar from Shen Wei’s other work and other contemporary choreographers—but the motions are exaggerated, pushed beyond a “normal” sense of rotation and balance. The dancers’ joints have a spongy quality, a sinking and rebounding that borders on collapse. At any point, it seems, the joints could just give way, but they spring back.

Re- (Part I), inspired by the choreographer’s travels in Tibet, has a meditative, Eastern aesthetic. With a low center of gravity and a sense of suspension, the movement resembles tai chi and other martial arts forms. Graceful and placid, the dancers show no emotion in their faces, or really, in their bodies; they seem as composed as Tibetan monks. Both men and women wear the same costumes and perform the same roles—there is no contact, no partnering in this dance. All in this world are equal, all part of the group.

The mandala is blurred, scrambled, as the dance continues. The paper marks the dancers’ bodies where they’ve made contact with the floor, sticking to knees, hips, the outside of an arm, before raining off as their movement continues. Although the precision of the mandala—often a symbolic representation of the cosmos—is disrupted by the movement, the dancers maintain a sense of order, alternating between dancing in the middle and anchoring the stage at all four corners. And, too, they seem to exude a quiet joy at the colorful disorder, the elements mixing into a glorious confetti.

The dance has a wonderful feeling of timelessness. The energy and flow of the work is constant, almost inevitable, as if it could—and will—continue forever under this subtly changing sky. The dance ends with a surge of the dancers into the center of the stage, the center of the mandala, and then out again. The dancers sink into a crouch, but this seems a temporary pause in the momentum of this world; surely the dance continues its steady, calm progression as soon as the curtain comes down.