The blend of the cerebral and the sensual that defines the polymath Chinese artist Shen Wei dominated the engagement of his company over the weekend at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. A choreographer whom one can admire intensely without necessarily loving, Shen Wei returns after a couple of years’ absence to the Bay Area as the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship and the director of an increasingly sleek and committed company, founded only eight years ago.
The two pieces that New York-based Shen Wei Dance Arts offered on Friday (March 7) seemed a remarkable progression after the choreographer’s calling-card bill in Berkeley in 2004. Again at YBCA, we got a sampling of Shen Wei, the rigorous structuralist, in the 2005 Map, and again we were granted a look at Shen Wei, the crosscultural etcher of movement in the 2006 Re- (Part 1). One can’t resist speaking of this choreographer in terms of visual arts, and, in truth, the facture of Shen Wei’s dances, the silken phrasing, is exquisite at best.
However, I was not a fan of this dancemaker’s version of Rite of Spring, which seemed a pallid update of generic 1970s "trance dance," that barely began to plumb the musical depths of the epochal Stravinsky score (why use it if your movement doesn’t interact with it?). Map for 13 dancers is also a pattern piece but Shen Wei is much more attuned to his score, Steve Reich’s minimalist The Desert Music (heard via recording), and the results are almost consistently compelling. Each of the seven parts of the 40-minute work explores a particular dance phrase or technique, wringing canonical, retrograde and contrapuntal variations on the seed material. And all of it seems to take its cue from the music.
It happens before a backdrop that suggests the graffiti (equations and such) of a couple of geniuses. At the start, one dancer, then another twists and rolls on the floor, and rises, to be supplanted by a colleague. In the second section, the focus is on bouncing and thrusting hips, followed by intense deconstructions of isolations and internal technique. An undulating torso assumes epic proportions when taken up by a dozen dancers. A flexed foot evolves from a cadence to a shared language. In the finale, Shen Wei combines the previously expostulated movement vocabularies in a vertiginous sequence that leaves you slightly exhausted.
Map scores over Rite of Spring in the sublime logic of its transitions. Shen Wei endows his choreography with an aura of inevitability. One feels that the work was assembled with the craft and eye for detail of a master jeweler and one can only empathize with these dancers (the piece must have been hell to learn). Also, in this piece, the fluid rearrangement of space often dazzles. The complexity of the vision is too much to take in on a single viewing. Shen Wei makes it a bit easier for us by cladding his dancers in different colored socks, but if ever a dance were destined for DVD, where it can be scrutinized and absorbed at leisure, Map is it.
We are told that Re- was inspired by the choreographer’s sojourn in Tibet. The "Part I" that follows Re- suggests that Shen Wei has more to say about this ritualistic exercise, which, Friday, assembled four dancers (Lindsay Clar, Dai Jian, Jessica Harris, Sara Procopio) moving, arching and stretching to traditional recorded chants from Tibet and the vocals of Ani Choying Dolma within Shen Wei’s decor, a mandala formation of circles, fashioned from bits of confetti.
The pace and reliance on unisons, the extended limbs all suggest an initiation ceremony. Meanwhile, the dancers sink and roll on the floor at a very deliberate pace and the confetti adheres to their costumes. Symmetries are shattered. Our very presence seems enough to rearrange our landscape. And the shining light at the center is extinguished, only to glow again.
Unfortunately, San Francisco didn’t get the entire piece. In earlier performances, Ani Choying Dolma appeared live and interacted with the dancers, a situation that doubtlessly generated a kind of tension missing here. The singer’s absence diminishes Re-, and one can only hope that when Shen Wei Dance Arts returns to town (which I am sure it will), the choreographer won’t deny us an essential element of his creations.
Shen Wei Dance Arts next performs Tuesday at 8 p.m. at Irvine Barclay Theater, Irvine, CA. Shen Wei Dance Arts also appears at 8 p.m. Friday, March 14, at the Mondavi Center for the Arts, Davis, CA.
