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Alexandra Tomalonis
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Shen Wei's Waking Dream

Shen Wei Dance Arts
By Alexandra Tomalonis
Special to The Washington Post
October 24, 2001

Shen Wei Dance Art’s “Near the Terrace,” a danced dreamscape unveiled at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater Tuesday night, is beautiful and wondrously strange. Dancers, dressed only in pale blue skirts, their bodies powdered white, walk with measured tread and fall, in slow motion, into each other’s arms. Someone is always moving--walking, crawling, rolling--yet there is little movement. The dancers repeat movements endlessly as though caught in a dream, unable to run, unable to escape danger, but there is no fear, only serenity.

Because the movements are so slow and controlled, Wei forces us to look closely at what each dancer is doing; a single slow pirouette seems like rebellion. Because his visual palette is so pale, hair color--jet black or burnished gold in contrast to the gray-powdered heads of other dancers--jumps from the stage like a roar of individuality. Wei is also a painter and this shows not only in his sense of color, but of composition. Every moment of this dance could be reproduced as a painting.

Wei’s rejection of realism and his celebration of beauty go against recent trends in dance. Even his grotesque movements are beautiful. At the end, he fills the stage with living, ancient, statues: heads bent backward until they’re invisible, arms hidden behind torsos. Beauty broken, he tells us, is beauty still.

“Near the Terrace” is in two parts, both commissioned by the American Dance Festival in successive years (2000, 2001). The first is by far the stronger, near perfect in its imagery and realization of an idea. It ends with the dancers walking up and over the terrace. The last we see of them are the trains of their skirts lapping softly into oblivion.

Unfortunately, this image is deflated by having the dancers immediately return, slithering down the terrace. A long and not very interesting solo by Wei is followed by the second section (to Indonesian music; the first section uses music of Arvo Part and Benjamin Iobst) where the dancers, now clad in peach skirts, are no longer isolated figures in an apocalyptic landscape, but docile acolytes, stretching and twisting their arms to echo movements in Wei’s solo. Redemption? Perhaps, but a disappointing one for those gentle souls who first crawled over the terrace.