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“Rite of Spring”, “Re-”
Shen Wei Dance Arts
Joyce Theater
New York, NY
September 26, 2006

by Leigh Witchel
copyright ©2006
by Leigh Witchel
   

A pinch of salt, one perfect rose, a single line on a canvas. Small things have immense power when the contrast is right. In his company’s season at the Joyce, Shen Wei is a master of the small gesture.  As the score of “The Rite of Spring” careens to the climax of the first tableau, the dancers stand immobile in the front of the stage with their eyes closed, dreaming. One man flicks his hand as if shooing a fly away that landed on him in his sleep; the entire audience’s focus is on that movement. 

“Re-”, Wei’s newest work, was performed by four dancers to traditional Tibetan chants, and inspired by Wei’s two trips to Tibet. Like the rest of his work, it’s visually arresting. The stage rose on a simplified mandala, a circle within a square that was created behind the curtain during the intermission out of blue and white flakes. The dancers rolled through it and it coated them like breadcrumbs. By the end of the dance the mandala had been obliterated, the colors mixed, and the whole stage sprinkled lightly with flakes. The dancers moved to the four corners of the stage and returned to the glowing center to recreate the square and the circle. One knew the dance had to end at that moment; Wei made nothing more than that feel like a resolution.

The four dancers were simply dressed in maroon tops, grey undershirts and brown pants; their movement was slow and meditative. The chanting by Ani Choying Dolma was haunting; sometimes keening and sometimes mumbled prayers.  As the dancers rolled and stood again, the flakes fell silently off them like snow and away from them like earthly concerns. They emerged purified.

Where “Re-” was filled with meditative calmness, “Rite of Spring” was full of nervous activity.  It couldn’t have been any other way; Stravinsky imposes his mood on any dance made to that music as surely as Tibetan chants do. 

Wei’s “Rite” is extremely musical, metrically so, in a way that few modern dance choreographers dare with Stravinsky. The original mise-en-scène was discarded in favor of abstraction. There is no Chosen One, although there’s a sense of selection at the opening as one dancer, out of all standing at the wings, moves in silence to the middle of the stage to take her place, and then one by one the others join her before the music begins.

Wei handled the score through his skill at contrast. He restrained the movements at the opening to small, obsessive walks and rudimentary rises so that there was somewhere to go when the famous slamming chords thundered in. A man sprung up and tumbled to the floor; it seemed like just enough because of what came before.  The bursts of technique taken freely from many dance forms (there’s a fall and spin to the floor with fanned legs used several times that comes straight out of breakdancing) showed that minimal vocabulary was an artistic choice, not a necessity. The thirteen dancers in the company, including Wei himself, performed all of it very well.

Wei’s craft is strong, but the choreography, though fluid and with more texture and technique than one would expect from something so pared down, is still repetitive; there’s one fan kick too many. He tackled “Rite” musically and structurally, but not emotionally. The hazard of the score is its history; any choreographer is competing with warring versions in the minds of the audience from Nijinsky to Disney, and even with idealized versions that the viewer has conjured from the score’s legends. Wei’s coolness kept his “Rite” at arm’s length; why these dancers have gathered and what this rite is about remained a mystery. The fascination of watching the dancers scurry in elaborate pathways was the compulsive fascination of watching an ant farm. There may be a purpose to all the activity but no one, not the watcher and not the ants, is fully able to explain it.          

Volume 4, No. 35
October 2, 2006

copyright ©2006 Leigh Witchel
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©2006 DanceView