Tastemaker: Choreographer Shen Wei
Choreographer Shen Wei brings a performance right into the audience's face, writes Janice Leung
New York-based Chinese choreographer Shen Wei has made his name on the international dance scene with his lyrical, visually alluring contemporary creations infused with Eastern sensibilities. You have seen his choreography before: one of his epic works, where dancers writhed to create ink paintings on a spectacular scroll-floor at the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, reached more than one billion viewers worldwide.
Body painting is a recurring motif in Shen's repertoire and will appear again this week in his dance company's third Hong Kong visit. But this time, the choreographer has shifted away from his signature dreamlike aesthetics towards a creative direction that reflects today's cosmopolitan society, where digital media and the internet play an integral role. "Digital culture is part of our lives. No matter if you like it or not, that's what the reality is," he says.
Closing this year's New Vision Arts Festival at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, the double-bill from Shen Wei Dance Arts comprises a modified version of Limited States, originally commissioned by the American Dance Festival last year. The piece, about "the limitation in time and space", uses multimedia - video projections and animation - to relate to our information age.
Despite the digital elements, Shen assures that it still is a live performance full of physical energy: "I use technology also to emphasise movement, to open new kinds of communications between art and the audience." His dancers will wear iPhones to capture and project other dancers' movement in real time.
Like many of Shen's works, Limited States is abstract; there is no story. "It's not set up for one line, one spot, one focus … It's like our time in reality. We see everything happening simultaneously; we choose what we want to focus on. I want the audience to be more engaged, rather than just sit there and say: show me what you have."
The second half of the double-bill, A World Premiere Work, requires an even more active audience: the dancers abandon the stage altogether to perform in the Cultural Centre foyer, a location that's not made for large-scale performances. During the 30-minute work, 17 dancers will scatter around the centre's ground floor, and the audience will watch them perform from different angles: one may view the entire environment from the upper levels, or walk into the performance area to inspect how the dancers undulate and contort their muscles.