Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Kennedy Center, 10.29.08
 |
| Shen Wei Dance Arts, Folding (2003) |
An old man in a neon green blazer walked up to me last night at the Kennedy Center.
“Is this the line for the Chinese ballet?” he asked.
I could answer half the question: No, it was not the ballet.
These dancers rippled from toe to shoulder and across to their fingertips; they swooped and near-fell with the rhythms of breath, like phrases of music. This was Martha Graham minus the angularity and grim high seriousness. In short, it was modern dance, a genre as American in its roots as jazz.
But was it Chinese? Director Shen Wei did leave home at age nine to study Peking Opera at a remote hillside school in Hunan province. Born in 1968, he belonged to the first generation of students to return to the art after the Cultural Revolution.
Wei left the state opera, however, to co-found the Guangdong Modern Dance Company and then to start his own group in the United States. A mainstay of the American Dance Festival, Shen Wei Dance Arts is now in residence at the Kennedy Center through 2011. The common ground for most of the dancers is not China, but North Carolina; the clearest influence on Wei’s work is not Peking Opera, but Graham and José Limón.
The Kennedy posters touted the show as East-West fusion, a popular choice for companies on the arts-center university-theater circuit. (Examples include “Rear Light,” a piece by the Beijing Modern Dance Company set to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”; and “Cursive,” a danced interpretation of Chinese characters by the Taiwanese company Cloud Gate Dance Theatre.) Wei himself has choreographed dances to Peking Opera music and Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”
What is the appeal of East-West fusion? Does it
- Make the foreign accessible
- Draw a more diverse audience
- Attract a Putumayo crowd otherwise uninterested in modern dance with an exotic culture and cause célèbre? After the performance, they can buy a book of photos Wei took in Tibet, with proceeds donated to an orphanage in Lhasa.
- Point toward a new sense of global culture while attempting to defuse the tensions it creates? You have a Chinese choreographer and mostly American dancers performing a dance about a trip to Tibet. The invoking of traditional culture — the mandala, the sound of the Tibetan long horn — calls attention from the modern conflict, with only a hidden peace symbol in the mandala serving as a reminder. On the other hand, it might also argue for a separate sense of Tibetan cultural identity.
 |
| Ruth St. Denis |
Whatever their appeal, Asian elements are hardly new to modern dance. Pioneering choreographers such as Ruth St. Denis milked the exotic Orient for mellifluous titles, entrancing motions, and fetching costumes. With Asian choreographers and companies taking on the form themselves, the history of the art comes full circle.
As for Wednesday’s performance, the dance “Re-” was based on the choreographer’s trip to Tibet. In a post-performance talk, Wei said he wanted to represent the “purity” of Tibet and the attention he paid to his breath in the high altitude. The dance was performed to Tibetan chant-singing on a mandala of colored confetti that the dancers dispensed from metallic bowls onto the stage.
The second dance, “Map,” was as abstract as they come: a “musical visualization” set to the work of minimalist composer Steve Reich. His strange and rich soundscape included perpetual rhythms, a smattering of Indonesian percussion, a chorus and weird siren sounds, and the occasional silence. (The director of the company jokingly offered free tickets to anyone who could identify the time signature.) Some dancers took on the mechanical sense of perpetual motion, others the eerie vocals of the choir, others the propulsive violins.
Throughout the evening, I thought less of fusion than of athleticism, the organic movement based on breath, and the sense the dances were choreographed on the performers’ bodies. It was just plain good dancing.
