Shen Wei

Last night I went to the Kennedy Center to watch Shen Wei dance theatre. It was a moving experience. Shen Wei seems to have successfully done what very few intercultural artists have achieved - a seamless fusion of the aesthetics of east and west. I tend to be somewhat skeptical of intercultural work which many times tend to be 90% western with 10% eastern accents via costumes or some adornment. Not true intergration.

From Shen Wei's work it was not clear where the ballet movements ended and where the eastern meditative elements began. The dancers were predominantly westerners and all have a certain aura/energy to them - individually and collectively. They were not your traditional ballerinas - neither were they your karma sprouting western spiritualists. They like the performance defied classification. They all seem to have like Shen Wei the choreographer lived in multiple cultures and have used that experience to inform their dance and movement work.

Shen Wei used his travels through Cambodia and the Silk Route to inform and inspire his work. Its funny - how I never saw the transformation of identify pre-travel and post-travel. The person you after you had visited a country with a rich history or a complex past is not the same person who started the trip. The way he used his photography as background projections to the choreography was harmonious and true to the energies and moods he was seeking to capture and convey. I felt transported and mesmerized. I was not looking at the dancers per se - it was such an integrated experience - where music, lights, design, costume and movement came together in a beautiful whole while comingling eastern and western energies. The piece that really moved me was the final piece with the topless dancers - the dancers were so unselfconscious. They exuded a sense of purity. And through their very slow movements eventually seem to evolve in sculptures. At a certain point I felt like I was looking at a painting from the classical period. I felt like I was in a museum studying a huge painting in front of me which was slowly drying into deep stillness. After I went home I kept thinking about it. And today I realized that I had experienced something deeply resonant. An artist who had so deeply integrated two cultures within himself and then is able to reach into this point of integration to create his works of art. I feel like I was at the cusp of a new movement. In thinking. In analyzing. A new paradigm that has managed through art to recaliberate a new equilibrium and a new paradigm on what it is to be global.