'Connect Transfer': Color It Endless

Shen Wei's Figment Clouded by Pigment

The red-and-gold foyer outside the Kennedy Center Concert Hall looked like the walls of a day-care center last night, with big bright squares of finger painting hanging over the railings. Except it wasn't finger painting, it was body painting; these scraps of canvas had covered the stage for Shen Wei Dance Arts' "Connect Transfer." In this ultra-gimmicky work, the dancers drench a foot or a hand in paint and roll around on the floor for about 75 uninterrupted minutes. You feel every one of them.

The scraps on display last night were from the troupe's performance of the work in Rome (a detail proudly cited on the labels). Tonight, you'll get to see the resulting doodles from what I saw last night, but let me save you the trouble: It's a whole lot of black loops, with some red splashed around, lots of smudgy bits and a few jots of orange and green. In other words, a mess.

Is it art? Shen Wei, the transplanted Chinese choreographer who has shot to the forefront of the modern dance scene and in September won a MacArthur Fellowship, is certainly capable of works of stirring simplicity, powerful understatement and subtle emotion, but "Connect Transfer" isn't one of them. It catalogues just about every gripe I've ever heard about modern dance from folks who despise it: clanging, groaning music (by Kevin Volans, Iannis Xenakis and Gyorgy Ligeti); pretentiously reverential periods of silence; silly and inscrutable movement (at one point, when pianist Gloria Cheng fires off a round of high notes, the dancers respond with frenzied tippy-toeing, bringing to mind Dieter, Mike Myers's slinky underground German on "Saturday Night Live," hissing, "Und now, vee dahnce!").

In a program note, Shen Wei writes that he "was driven by connections," but throughout the work his dancers adopt that maddening scanning-the-horizon stare -- maddening because they are, in fact, not connecting with anything.

Don't get me wrong: There is gorgeous movement in this piece, infused with Shen Wei's customary boneless softness. The 12 dancers, including the choreographer, move with an exquisite melting and spiraling. Shen Wei's concept is interesting and original: the unpredictability of large-scale doodling, and what kind of contrails do dancing bodies leave behind. For a while, it is lovely to watch. And yet it goes on and on, and the musical mood gets darker and more fragmented. The painting is all being done in black, and the dancers are wearing black. One's interest was piqued when someone with a red sock (or was it a red mitten?) thrashed around for a bit, but then the black smears came back in force, and one resorted to wishing they'd just slosh on a whole big bucket of yellow and roll around in that.

The performance repeats tonight at 7:30. If you miss it, you can also catch Shen Wei's work in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.