Artistic director
Shen Wei
Choreographer
Shen Wei
Dancers
Tony Orrico
James Healy
Jessica Harris
Alexa Hershna
Kennis Hawkins
Kana Sato
Brooke Broussard
Sara Procopio
Nian-Nian Zhou
Vicki Skinner
Jesse Zaritt
Hou Ying
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Right of Spring
and Folding
Shen Wei Dance Arts
Sadler's Wells
12 - 13 October 2004
Ambition is not the missing element in Shen Wei's choreography. Anyone choreographing to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" - the piece with which Shen Wei and his company made their UK debut this month - and drawing from as many dance and ballet traditions, Chinese and Western, as this 35-year old artistic polymath does is certainly daring.
Shen Wei is a choreographer, dancer, painter and designer, born in Hunan, China but now based in New York. He has assembled a troupe of formidable precision. The marionette-like gyrations and somersaulting dives of the dancers in Rite of Spring were perfectly executed, their movements spring-loaded, their coordination flawless. But the vocabulary of movement was limited, rather than merely sparse. There was too much running over the stage and repetitive twisting and hurling of limbs. There is visceral, impulsive energy here - reflecting the relentless pacing of Stravinsky's score - but, compared to the many dimensions of Stravinsky's evocation of a restless universe, Shin Wei's choreography seemed curiously flat.
His second work, Folding, originally created for the Guangdong modern dance company in 2000, was altogether more interesting. Its brilliantly sculpted, sinewy movements demanded dancers of this calibre. Figures in trailing red or black garments and wearing conical hats, some of them in seemingly conjoined pairs, glided glacially over the stage to a soundtrack by John Tavener overlaid by sporadic Tibetan chanting. It is hard to avoid clichC) when presenting a spectacle redolent of Buddhist temples, with slow moving, silent, figures and the sounding of resonant gongs, but Shin Wei did so; indeed, he achieved something powerfully surreal, with his combination of swift, small steps and calm, meditative movement.
For all its originality, though, this second piece was also oddly unmoving. It had its big ideas, its strikingly imaginative moments, but again dimensions were missing.
Simon May
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