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It's clear that Shen Wei is a visual artist as well as a choreographer. He "paints" with his dancers - sometimes literally. Near the Terrace is a painting come to life which draws you into its meditative world. The controlled, slow movements of the dancers are mesmerizing - I'm in awe.
The second act was the dancer creating herself and a canvas below with paint as she moved sensually to her own music. I loved it! Very inspiring.
Unfortunately, this show was not good! My overall feeling: it was weird for the sake of being weird. I wish these dancers talents could have been show cased...instead they looked like fools.
This event was terrible. I do not call it dance. The sounds were very irritating. It was a total waste of my time and money. The middle "dance was ok and interesting with the dancer rolling on the paint.
The movements were, for the most part, interesting and worth watching. The only obvious exceptions were the ball tossing and bucket carrying; which seemed trite. But the sound effects were irritating and generally detracted from the piece. Not sure what they were thinking when they came up with this stuff, but it pretty much stunk. They could have done much better. Maybe they thought they were being artsy and invoking some deeper meaning; but it didn't work out that way. Very disappointing; in as much as it did so much to detract from the generally good dancing.
I had high expectations but in this case found avant garde to be simply boring. No emotional content, no story, dissonant "music"; I could not wait for this performance to be over. A waste of $100.
I had seen Shen Wei last year and was excited to attend again this year. However, I was left a bit confused with the show. It was three works with no intermission, and really no break in between, which I found to be problematic. There were some hallmarks of the troupe's innovation, but then there were some vestiges of early modern dance that did not seem to make sense for me -- for example, strident, non-melodic music, unrelated readings of weather reports, dancers doing repetitive movements such as going up and downstairs, and throwing balls back and forth, etc. I loved the use of video in the first work -- videos of dancers as well as the actual dancers themselves. The second work had a solo performer in wonderful positions and using the paint/color on the floor technique that I fell in love with last year. I liked the movements of the third work. In the elevator going to the parking garage, as we were all stuffed in, one woman exclaimed: " OK. Now can you really tell me that you liked this stuff? I mean, I was a dancer and I thought it was horrible!!" We all laughed, but then another woman said what I was feeling: " I am not sure if I LOVED it or HATED it." Confused.
I know it may not be very avant garde but, I like a little music with my dance. The dancers were beutiful, talented, but redundant. It was like sitting at a bad Phillip Glass concert. I fell a sleep, over & over & over again.
