The vocation of Oriente Occidente to look indiscriminately to the East and West and the intersections of these two poles finds this year, in hosting Shen Wei Dance Arts, a New York-based company led by the brilliant Chinese choreographer Shen Wei, the most innovative and acclaimed fusion of these cultures.
The 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 an even older tradition than the Beijing Opera. He later 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, a city 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 showcases an original exploration of movement, an entirely Eastern spirituality, and a selection of themes, music, and spaces capable of creating a unique hybrid between East and West. This is evidenced by the choice to stage a renewed Rite of Spring, Stravinsky’s masterpiece associated with Diaghilev’s Russian Ballets in Paris. “I listened to Stravinsky’s Rite for the first time in China in 1989,” recalls Shen Wei. “I was fascinated by the richness and evocative power of this music. For the next twelve years, I continued to develop an interest in the score and finally, in 2001, I delved into studying the music. I was further inspired when I heard Fazil Say’s solo piano version.”
Thus, in 2003, his Rite of Spring was born on the four-hand piano version by Fazil Say. In a black-and-white film-like setting, 'interrupted' only by white stripes running the length and breadth of the stage, the twelve performers render the energy and rhythmic drive of the score visible through choreography that pushes them from one point of the space to another, saturating it as painting saturates a canvas.
Anna Kisselgoff writes in the New York Times about the work: “The visual and emotional impact is overwhelming. Shen Wei’s vision is pictorial, mathematical, and very personal. There is an absolutely original use of movement: compressing the torso to bend it, making it explode in sudden twists and spirals, or, by contrast, making it glide along the floor and roll on the back, in the popular Chinese style. In this eclecticism, however, the movement begins pure: this Rite dazzles with its astonishing objectivity that extends beyond ordinary meaning.”
