Шен Вей
שן וויי
沉伟

Rite of Spring

source: shenweidanceartsorg

Internationally recognized for the breadth and scope of his artistic vision, Shen Wei is a prolific choreographer and stage director; set, costume, lighting and make-up designer; painter and filmmaker. The Washington Post has called Shen Wei “One of the great artists of our time” and The New York Times proclaimed, “If there is something to write home about in the dance world, it is the startlingly imaginative work of the Chinese-born choreographer Shen Wei.”

Admiration for his talent has earned Shen Wei numerous commissions and awards, including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the U.S. Artists Fellow award, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Nijinsky Award, Australia’s Helpmann Award for Best Ballet or Dance Work, and two recognitions from the New York Times for creation of one of the year’s best dance performances.

Born in Hunan, China, Shen Wei studied Chinese opera from the age of nine. In I99I, he became a founding dancer and choreographer of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the first modern dance company in China. In I995, he received a scholarship from Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab and moved to New York City. In July 200I, he formed Shen Wei Dance Arts with performances of Near the Terrace at the American Dance Festival.

Shen Wei has received numerous commissions from the American Dance Festival and others from Het Muziektheater, New York City Opera, Lincoln Center Festival, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, and Teatro Dell’ Opera di Roma for a restaging of Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto, conducted by Riccardo Muti. Last June, Shen Wei was honored to be the first choreographer commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a work specifically for one of its galleries. In 2011 Shen Wei also received commissions from the Edinburgh International Festival and the Park Avenue Armory.

Shen Wei is an artist-in-residence at Mana Contemporary and was recently selected as a fellow for New York City Center’s inaugural Choreography Fellowship Program.
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source: shenweidanceartsorg

Shen Wei Dance Arts is internationally recognized for its interdisciplinary cross-cultural performances, which have been described as “breathtaking, powerful, and riveting” (The Boston Globe) and celebrated for their “gorgeous visual imagery” (The London Times). Each work unveils an original movement vocabulary combined with elements of film, theater, new media, and visual art.

The company has toured extensively to over 30 countries and 130 cities, performing at such premier festivals and venues as the Venice Biennale, Het Muziektheater, and the Hong Kong New Vision Festival. In the U.S., the company has been presented five times by the Lincoln Center Festival; enjoyed a unique five-year performance residency at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC; and given the first dance performances on the concert stage at Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

Shen Wei’s acclaimed touring repertory includes Folding (2000), Connect Transfer (2004) and the company’s most recent program-length touring work, Limited States (2011). In addition to his touring repertory, Shen Wei is known for his site-specific creations, including his choreographic response to Ernesto Neto’s serpentine art installation, built in the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall (2007) and Connect Transfer II, installed at New York’s historic Judson Memorial Church, using paint-strewn bodies to create traditional ink paintings on a vast canvas used as the dancing floor (2008).

Recently, SWDA was featured at the Edinburgh International Festival, sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in London. Shen Wei has also been commissioned to create a site-specific work within the Maramotti Gallery in Reggio Emilia, Italy, for performances on October 21 and 23, during the company’s fall tour to Italy and Slovenia. Shen Wei is currently the first choreographer to be honored as a Park Avenue Armory Artist in Residence (2010–11). This residency will culminate in the creation of a new work, generously commissioned by the Armory, and the restaging of two of the choreographer’s most renowned pieces, Folding (2000) and Rite of Spring (2003), which will be performed in the Armory’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, capping the company’s 2011 New York Home Season (November 29–December 4).

For its 2012 season, Shen Wei Dance Arts has been selected for New York City Center’s inaugural Choreography Fellowship Program, a new initiative being launched in conjunction with the theater’s reopening season.
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source: ballet-dance

An evening with Chinese-born artist Shen Wei, whose eponymously named company Cal Performances presented at Zellerbach Hall last week, left me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, his “Folding” presented an eyeful of unusual and sometimes moving imagery. On the other hand though, there was an undercurrent of unrelenting, formalized isolation that nagged at me, even as I appreciated the care and imagination that governed each piece.

Shen’s pieces, though meticulously planned and realized, are not quite at the level of those of, say, Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan’s Lin Hwai-Min. Nevertheless, his works have a striking visual impact and whatever they may lack in structural core they make up for in detail.

“The Rite of Spring” demonstrates less underlying imaginative invention than “Folding.” Shen’s style here is to deploy groups of disengaged dancers, who hardly ever look at each other, much less touch. There are no human connections to be made in this “Rite.” Whereas most choreographers take a gut-level approach to the Igor Stravinsky score as the ultimate invocation of human physicality, Shen’s take is almost autonomic, a response to the notes and accents that never really gets at the music’s viscerality.

As the “Rite” begins, the dancers assemble on either side of the open stage space, facing off across a gray marley on which Shen has painted his own designs. Ten dancers arrive, one by one, and as the eleventh appears, she precipitates a kind of imbalance, causing the others to glide at a ceremonial pace to the middle of the stage like pieces in a giant chess board.

Shen’s grey-toned costumes and pale makeup imply a sort of nowhere/everywhere, an effect compounded by the unseeing expression on the dancers’ faces, as if they were mannequins or cogs in a giant machine. They scuttle back and forth like drones impelled by mounting urgency, to a recorded four-hand piano version of the Stravinsky score. When they come together it seems more because they are coincidentally doing the same step at the same point in the music, not because they want to meet — phrases of movement are written side-by-side, but not blended. Only at one point, when the dancers stare out directly at the audience, do we sense the human life behind their eyes.

Pivots, spirals, “Crazy Legs” backspins, plops to the floor all have a decidedly clean execution, and the movement reads authoritatively on everyone, from the small compact Hou Ying to the lanky Kennis Hawkins, whose compelling solo work takes on a softness of personality against her hard-edged technique. A solo for Shen continues the spiral motif, with a picture-perfect, wheeling pitch turn and outflung arms that wrap about him like a flamenco dancer. Ultimately though, this “Rite of Spring” comes across more like a movement study or a mood piece rather than a full-fledged statement, leaving us with too little to think about except for the music.

Clearly, though, in both works, Shen is striving for an all-encompassing theatrical vision. For “Folding” we moved upstairs to get more of the large-scale effect. Now, after seeing the piece, I would encourage anyone who can to sit higher up to view the work, as I’m convinced it enhances the experience.

Isolation and ritualistic detachment of a different sort is signaled as a recording of the low thrum of Tibetan monks chanting fills dark stage space, upon which light slowly dawns to reveal a backdrop of a few painted fish swimming alone in a pale ocean.

Conceived by Shen after a 17th century Chinese painting by legendary calligrapher, Bada Shanren, the setting at once formalizes and stylizes “Folding.” Bada Shanren’s own scrolls, which were highly influential upon Japanese Zen painting, reflect an understated, yet tumultuous inner life shaped by the fall of the Ming dynasty. His signature, which appears at the corner of the backdrop, itself suggests internal contradictions: the characters that make up his name can be written in such a way that they look like both the words “laugh” and “cry.”

Precariously balanced contradictions seem to be the theme of “Folding,” in which pairs of dancers in long blood-red, fishtail-trained skirts and ivory-painted bodies cut silkily across the stage like swaying carp.

As quietly as the Tibetan chants shift to the toll of John Tavener’s bells, the scene morphs from a koi pond to Deep Sea exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium as Shen unleashes a slow parade of fascinating creatures, one after the other. An unnaturally tall, queenly critter in a black skirt appears off to one side — obviously a dancer on another’s shoulders – and when she takes a backbend, cantilevering against her host, the arch is spectacular. A sort of Siamese-twin pair oozes past — two torsos gliding atop the same skirt bottom. And Shen adds hieratic figures, one creature guiding another soul like Orpheus leading Eurydice from Hades. Eventually the group swirls and folds into a tight knot at the center of the stage, as if drawn to the pool of light, while Shen performs a solo downstage.

Who are they and what are they about? Most of it is open to your own interpretation. Throughout “Folding,” a small pendulum swings downstage left. Marker of time? Reminder of mortality? Bait line? When asked, the choreographer’s response is, “It is whatever you think it is.”

As beautiful and effective as it is, “Folding” is still not quite a masterful work. It is a trace too long, and paced too slowly at times. Nevertheless, by the time the dancers ascend to their final tableau — a disc of red skirts floating in the blackness like the flames that ring Shiva the Destroyer — it’s clear that there will be no forgetting these images.
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source: liveinternetru

Балетмейстер, каллиграф, художник и фотограф, создающий не просто танец, а спектакль, где он ставит хореографию, Шен Вей также создает костюмы, декорации и самолично подбирает музыку.

Шен Вей – американец китайского происхождения, танцовщик и хореограф, художник и скульптор, руководитель труппы Shen Wei Dance Arts (США) родился в 1968 году в Китае, прославился еще в юности в Китайской опере, и посему молодость поделил между США и Китаем. В свое время Шен Вей в течение десяти лет учился искусству китайской оперы – причем на высочайшем профессиональном уровне, изучая одновременно танец, пение, музыку, сценографию и искусство макияжа, а в Нью-Йорке обосновался с 1995 года. В 2008 году его пригласили стать главным хореографом Пекинской летней Олимпиады. Предшествовало этому следующее: его родители – певцы классической оперы – родили мальчика в отдаленной деревенской местности отдаленной китайской провинции. В 9 лет Шен Вей был “сдан” родителями учеником-подмастерьем в Китайскую оперу, уже через несколько лет был принят в балетную труппы оперы в Сиане – древней столице Китая – и исполнял там заглавные партии с 1984 по 1991 год. В 1991 году (то есть в возрасте всего 23 лет) был назначен хореографом и танцором в ансамбле современного танца в Гуангдонге. В 1995 получил стипендию Николаса-Льюиса для изучения балета и переехал Нью-Йорк. За прошедшие 15 лет в Америке Шен Вей успел невероятно много: прежде всего прославиться, получить множество премий и призов, создать в 2000-м году свою труппу “Искусство танца” – “Dance Arts”, которая гастролирует по всему миру и, главное – сделать нечто новое в балете.

Его работы, которые объединяют в себе идеи Востока и Запада, элементы национальной китайской оперы, движения из боевых искусств, абстрактный экспрессионизм и западный модернизм, привлекают множество поклонников. Его постановки отражают фундаментальные идеи китайской философии и эстетики, преломленные в современном европейском стиле. Обучавшийся в Пекинской опере, где одновременно преподают танец, пение, музыку, сценографию и искусство макияжа, Шен Вей сам занимается всем – кроме музыки. Некоторые критики сравнивают его постановки с импровизационной живописью Джексона Поллока.
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source: israel-operacoil

מנהל אמנותי: שן וויי

להקתו של הכוריאוגרף הסיני-אמריקאי הנודע שן וויי, שיצר את הכוריאוגרפיה לטקס הפתיחה של אולימפיאדת בייג‘ין, מגיעה ארצה עם גרסתם המיוחדת לפולחן האביב בערב של מחול מודרני במיטבו.