By Lisa Traiger
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, March 21, 2008
Interested in dance, but hoping for something different this time? This weekend and next, Washington will host two dance geniuses (both MacArthur Fellowship winners): Shen Wei, a choreographer on the rise, and Merce Cunningham, the great modern dance iconoclast. Their innovative and original works include unusual outside materials such as iPods and paint.
Shen WeiIn "Connect Transfer" -- the 2004 work by Shen, a dancer, choreographer and painter -- 12 company members use their bodies as paint brushes, leaving their physical traces on a floor-sized canvas covering the stage of the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall.
A Chinese-born, New York-based artist who founded his company just eight years ago, Shen bridges the worlds of dance and art, East and West, with his fluid, creative sensibility drawn from training in classical Chinese opera, which included song, music, design, scenery and calligraphy, and American modern dance.
"I was thinking about how when we dance, we move continuously and don't stop," Shen Wei said speaking recently from Beijing. "We don't separate one movement from the next: Everything is connected from one movement to another."
A visual artist as well as a choreographer, he wanted to see how the two could intimately relate. "Dancers put out a huge theatrical energy when they perform," said the 39-year-old choreographer. "My idea was to see how the dance could leave a trace of that" after the dancers exit.
In addition to the visual after-images, the dancers' movement contributes to the aural environment of the piece, which features pianist Gloria Cheng and the Flux Quartet. The dancers' breath, steps, falls and slides are amplified by microphones.
"Connect Transfer" is best viewed from the theater's tiers and boxes where the painting, created by the dancers during the 70-minute work, becomes visible.
The following day, after the large canvas dries, Shen Wei selects and cuts the best art into smaller canvases, signs them and sells them for $20 to more than $500 in the Grand Foyer. (Canvases from a previous performance will be sold after Friday's show). But for Shen Wei, the choreography remains most important: "I'm not asking my dancers to be painters. They're not trying to make an image on the floor. They're just trying to dance."
Merce CunninghamMost remarkable about Cunningham is neither his age, 88, nor his creative output, choreographing nearly 200 dances over a career that began with a solo concert in 1944.
Cunningham, ever the iconoclast, is exceptional for his insatiable curiosity and willingness to experiment.
On Thursday, his renowned company returns to Washington for three performances at Sidney Harman Hall to perform three works.
"CRWDSPCR" -- which, written in instant-message-like language, can be read as "Crowd Spacer" or "Crowds Pacer" -- is a dance developed using a software program called "DanceForms." The program allows Cunningham to manipulate bodies on screen before he gets dancers into the studio to begin the choreographic process. The work is generally frenetic, interrupted with a slow solo. Like much of Cunningham's choreography, the dancers exhibit an acuity of line and form: bodies slicing and paring through the space with a determined quickness.
"Second Hand" is being revived after its 1970 introduction. Cunningham's assistant, Robert Swinston, used old notes, fading memories of original dancers and two archival films -- one without audio -- to redo the piece that includes 10 dancers in costumes by painter Jasper Johns.
Finally, the program's most recent work uses one of today's most ubiquitous items: the iPod. In "eyeSpace," the performers dance to an original score that is programmed on iPods distributed at the event. (Or, download the score from iTunes or http://www.wpas.org on your own iPod before the performance and bring it with you.)
"I didn't quite know what the iPod was," Cunningham admitted last week, "so I asked Mikel [Rouse, the composer] for more information. It was explained that it was this quite small apparatus which the individual could use to hear things and could make their own arrangement with the sound. That interested me, so I said let's go ahead with it."
Rouse's electronic score, "International Cloud Atlas," includes sounds recorded on the streets from cities where the company tours.
Before the piece begins, the audience is instructed to put the iPod on shuffle so there's no telling when a spectator will hear bossa nova, electronic music, prepared piano music, rock-and-roll or another selection from Rouse's genre-spanning score. Rouse estimates a potential of three million permutations. "Each person listens to a different section of music while they're watching the same dance," Rouse said.
Rouse was intrigued by the idea that people are used to closing themselves off while listening to the iPod, while they are used to attending theater in a very public way. But rarely -- if ever -- have they been asked to do both at the same time.
He notes that the concept of experiencing sound in a very personal way, while also having a very public experience, "at first doesn't sound like a big deal, but for some people it's incredibly revelatory and for others it's deeply disturbing because you're in this room with a thousand people and yet you're sealed off."
Cunningham, though still not an adapter of the iPod technology outside the realm of "eyeSpace," foresees a time when dance, too, will advance in technologically similar ways. "We had a work in repertoire that was made up of individual movements, which the individual dancers rearranged so it could be different each time," he said. "As the technology advances, I should think that there could be a way to make the dance interchangeable," similar to an iPod shuffle.
He laughs. "I don't quite know how, but I don't see any reason why there wouldn't be some way to do that."
Shen Wei Dance Arts Kennedy Center Concert Hall, 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600. www.kennedy-center.org. Friday and Saturday. $19-$48. Merce Cunningham Dance Company Sidney Harman Hall, 610 F St. NW. 202-785-9727. www.wpas.org. Thursday-March 29. $25-$70. Shen Wei Dance Arts Kennedy Center Concert Hall, 2700 F St. NW. 202-467-4600. www.kennedy-center.org. Friday and Saturday. $19-$48.
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