With Shen Wei, it's 'Let's get visual'
Lewis Segal, LA Times

Rigorously stylized and modulated contemporary dancing dominated by a sophisticated sense of spatial design: That's Shen Wei Dance Arts, the New York-based company that made its local debut on Friday with a two-part program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
...
Like Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-min of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, British modernist Siobhan Davies and too many midranked others, Shen Wei seems to approach dance as a visual art — and it isn't. It's a physical art, one that may bedazzle us visually but achieves its deepest impact when it stimulates our muscle-memories, our body awareness or kinetic subconscious, if you like.
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Each took Stravinsky's mighty score in a provocative direction to something like a dead-end, ultimately failing to physicalize its extremes and grimly confirming the adage that two wrongs don't make a "Rite."

Dimensions help cast a surreal spell
Laura Bleiberg, Orange County Register

Dance is a multidimensional art form, but it's a rare choreographer who knows how to, or is even interested in, creating in all dimensions at once.

Very few can instinctively weave their kinetic imperatives with a total spatial design, making something bigger than the sum, engaging the entire proscenium space.

Shen Wei is one of those few. The two dances his company presented at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Friday night (part of the Music Center's dance season) were sensory and sensual wonders.

Perennial Beauties and Fresh Tracks

By DEBORAH JOWITT
The Village Voice
July 26, 2004

In Connect Transfer, Shen Wei combines his twin interests—choreography and painting—in a way that goes beyond creating dances and canvases.

Swimming Rite - Interview with Shen Wei

by Donald Hutera, Ballet-Dance Magazine

Born in China, and with an extensive background in Chinese Opera, 36 year-old Shen Wei has lived in New York City since 1995. He is a painter and choreographer, as well as a performer in his own young company, Shen Wei Dance Arts. Umbrella is bringing a contrasting pair of his works to London. <a href=http://www.ballet-dance.com/200407/articles/ShenWeiinterview20040700.html target=_blank>more</a>

A painter's gift shows in Shen Wei's dance

Rachel Howard
SF Chronicle

About two years ago, it seemed every dance presenter in the country was clamoring to book Shen Wei Dance Arts. <a href=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/09/29/DDG7U8VVED1.DTL target=_blank>more</a>

Shen Wei Dance Arts

By Jill Sykes
Sydney Morning Herald

Two contrasting works by Shen Wei and his company illustrate the extraordinary skill and imagination of this Chinese American in creating dance and moving images. <a href=http://www.smh.com.au/news/Review/Shen-Wei-Dance-Arts/2005/01/14/1105582708134.html?oneclick=true target=_blank>more</a>

Nature's helping hand to debut choreographer

by SHARON VERGHIS
the Sydney Morning Herald

Sydney, which he sees as a half-Asian, half-Western city, would be perfect for his newest work, based on Chinese and Western opera, he says. Its extrovert, physical vibe, he believes, would also suit another work where paint-splattered dancers roll on a canvas, creating a giant Jackson Pollock-style painting.

Rapturous focus on body in space

by DEBORAH JONES
the Australian

SHEN Wei is a dancer, a choreographer, a set, costume and make-up designer, and a painter. Of all those things, he is undoubtedly first and foremost a painter.

His Rite of Spring is a study in shape, volume, patterns and texture. The viewer gets to decide what meaning, if any, to derive from it.

Rite of Spring; Folding

by HILLARY CRAMPTON
the Age

He avoids any narrative references, relying entirely on choreographic craft to create a visual and temporal swirl of forces, set to Fazil Say's startling four-handed piano interpretation of the score.

...

Shen Wei strategically positions movement in contrasting or complementary blocks. Dancers coalesce in tight ensembles or dissolve and disperse into individual obsessions with particular movements. At one particularly savage moment in the score, the dancers are almost motionless, manifesting barely visible twitches, as if the massive energy of the music paralyses them.

Shen & Vicinity
in the New York Times

The Chinese-born, New York-based choreographer Shen Wei says he's dissatisfied with dancing that's just "pose, pose, pose." That dissatisfaction has driven him to develop one of the more distinctive, and difficult, dance techniques around.

published: July 17, 2005