Shen Wei is an awesome dance company and still has one more performance at Meany Theater at the University of WA.
Dancer, choreographer Shen Wei is native born to China but living in the US when not traveling world wide. Trained in Chinese Opera from the age of 7, Shen Wei's dances are beautifully imaginative--eye candy for the soul.
We saw two performances tonight, one set to Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" choreographed in 2003, features dancers in grey and white on a checkerboard dance floor swirled with cloud formations. I was amazed at the control the dancers showed in performing to this difficult piece of music. The ideas set off in my brain were fantastic--almost a statement on entropy, with dancers shuffling about like atoms bumping others off and yet, having their own life spin, almost like electrons or mini-whirl winds or flowing together like breezes. Fun.
Then we saw his earlier design, 2000, of "Foldings" set to music by John Taverner and Tibetan Buddhist chant, you enter a fantasy world, where red clad buddhist monks scurry up a mountain through fog and then magically turn into carp swimming in a pond and later anemones beneath the sea, but before long, two headed creatures arrive like Neptune on a snail, or old man mountains making love, and then a devilish star fish rolls past, and then the entire school of fish stare off toward where they can see out of the pond, looking longingly up and then evolve up and out.
It's a pricey performance with tickets set at $42 each, but well worth seeing such a highly trained world class dance company. You rarely see dancers so able to articulate at every joint with strong gestures and move so seamlessly that you rarely question their ability to hold a stance or flip over. Bravo!
In a Q/A session following the performance, Shen Wei made a number of points. 1) He has an idea for a production and keeps tight control over what occurs from staging, costumes, choreography, music, even though he takes some input from dancers, etc. about their capabilities. He wants to see his vision come to life. 2) He believed it important to travel extensively and seek different ideas from nature and history and cultures world wide 3) His dancers are trained in his methods 4) He believes he's a different person since coming to the US, able to explore and learn much more extensively than he thought possible. He said in terms of dance, there was only a few tough rules in China, like having the males chest's bared during the dance--Folding was created for a Chinese dance company.