The vocation of Oriente Occidente to look indiscriminately to the East and the West and at the intersections of these two poles finds this year in the hospitality of Shen Wei Dance Arts, a New York company led by the brilliant Chinese choreographer Shen Wei, the most innovative and acclaimed fusion of these cultures. Thirty-five-year-old Shen Wei has studied Chinese opera since the age of nine, working from 1984 to 1989 for the Hunan State Xian Opera Company, a company that preserves a tradition even older than the Beijing Opera. Subsequently, he joined the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the first Chinese contemporary dance company, for which he was also a choreographer from 1991 to 1994. After winning a scholarship to the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab in 1995, he moved to New York, where he immersed himself in Western dance culture. In 2001, he founded Shen Wei Dance Arts in the Big Apple, an ensemble that fully reflects the versatility of its director (who is a choreographer, dancer, designer, painter, and director) and whose artistic expression presents an original search for movement, an entirely Eastern spirituality, and a choice of themes, music, and spaces capable of creating a unique hybridism between East and West. This is evidenced by the decision to stage a renewed Rite of Spring, Stravinsky's masterpiece linked to the Parisian experience of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. "I listened to Stravinsky's Rite for the first time in China in 1989. I was fascinated by the richness and evocative power of this music," Shen Wei recalls. The second piece presented at the Festival, Folding (2000), was instead conceived in China for the Guangdong Modern Dance Company and later transferred to his own company. It is an abstract work, nourished by a refined Eastern slowness, almost a danced installation. The dancers' bodies float as if in a surreal limbo, dressed in bright red and black, their heads wrapped in an elaborate hairstyle that is both prosthesis and extension of the brain. Behind them, the large hand-painted backdrop alludes to an 18th-century watercolor by Ba Dan San Ren and evokes the sea, while under their very light feet, a reflective floor creates the effect of a water mirror. Distilled beauty accompanied by a Tibetan Buddhist chant, Mahakala, contaminated with slight melodies by John Tavener.
