Shen Wei Dance Arts Brings Rite of Spring and Folding to Houston

The Setup:

On May 18, in the Wortham Center’s Brown Theater, a
stage typically reserved for the artists of Houston Ballet, the Society for the
Performing Arts presented Shen Wei Dance Arts and the company’s riveting reinterpretation
of The Rite of Spring.

The Execution:

Shen Wei’s Houston engagement came 11 days
before the 100th anniversary of the infamous Paris premiere of Vaslav Nijinsky’s
The Rite of Spring. Wei’s reimagining of the Igor Stravinsky score is a decade
old, but it’s great to be able to see it so shortly after another major staging
of the piece for comparison’s sake. (I’m referring to, of course, Houston
Ballet’s spring engagement of Stanton Welch’s version.)

Shen Wei strips the Stravinsky music of narrative theatricality
and instead uses a minimalist, almost geometric sensibility to the
choreography. Ten dancers take positions on opposing sides of a grid-like floor
painting and then move onto it like pieces on a chest board. One by one, the
dancers move into one another’s space, causing them to react by readjusting their
space on the grid. Then the music begins and the careful, strategic placements
go haywire.

Despite the dynamism of the Stravinsky score, the
movement is not dominated by it, but rather informed by it. The ensemble, which
eventually swells to 14 dancers, scurries across the stage in minute
steps and mini-chassés. When the music becomes more aggressive, the bodies
hurtle to the floor and then shoot upwards in a dizzying relay of level
changes. The intention of the dancers is strong, which is seen when they
confront the audience in a single downstage line, their chests heaving for
breath with faces of stone which underscore the power of this refashioning.

The choreography is at times flowery, harsh and
disjointed at others. Much like the music, the movement takes many sharp turns.
Because there is no story, there is a startling sense of ominous mystery that
is exciting to behold, but what does it mean besides an attempted literal
interpretation of the score? Wei’s Rite of Spring is a math equation with many possible
solutions.

Rite of Spring was the one half of the program that
was heavily promoted in press previews, but it was the second dance, Folding,
that held me spellbound. Folding, originally staged in 2000, uses Tibetan
Buddhist chants to haunting effect. I’ve heard live Buddhist chanting in
Dharamsala, but its calming effects are transfigured into more alarming
sensations when paired with the bodies that glide across the stage. The dancers
perform in head-to-toe white body paint and are affixed with otherworldly
bulbous heads. Clad in blood red skirts, they shuffle onto the stage and off, and
then move in unison in simple figure eights.

Black-skirted figures arrive in pairs, their full
skirts distorting their dimensions to where it is impossible to discern where
one body ends and the other begins. The pairs give the impression of occupying a
single body, a folded body to be exact. The monastic movements are eerie and
beautiful at the same time, their slow methodical movements suggesting
sculptures brought to life. The final image is breathtaking: nine dancers
ascend a staircase in the background, a single body is splayed on the floor
downstage right and a lone wanderer repeatedly enters and exits the wings on
the opposite side. I had the feeling that I had just witnessed a rapture of
some sort.

The Verdict:

Shen Wei’s sparse and carefully structured Rite of
Spring gives new meaning to Stravinsky’s majestic score, but it is the
hypnotizing Folding that caused a sensational flurry of conversation once the
curtain fell and the lights came up. The dance has a pureness of movement and
simplicity of design that can only be described as elegant, but its power is in
its haunting images of large-skirted, ghost-white beings that are without
question alien, yet, unmistakably human. Folding is dance that embeds itself in
the audience’s consciousness and stays there.