“Rite of Spring,” “Folding,” “Undivided Divided”
Shen Wei Dance Arts
Park Avenue Armory
New York, New York
December 2, 2011
By Michael Popkin
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Popkin
Shen Wei’s Armory show combined dance with installation and performance art within the spectrum of New York’s trendy contemporary art scene. The three works in different genres - modern dance, multi-cultural spectacle and finally an installation of semi-nude dancers that had the audience wandering among the performers – were as diverse as what you’ll see in the downtown galleries, but were compromised by exactly the major weakness of those shows – the facile substitution of clever ideas for creativity. Shen is a talented dance-maker and dramatist but dance and drama need to be meaningful in order to be good.
With the audience sitting in steep bleachers around three sides of the stage, it was like watching a fast-forward video of Grand Central Station from above during rush hour, with the commuters scurrying here and there, avoiding each other, but animated by an overall social plan. Collectively they looked insect-like, and this perhaps made sense with reference to the “human sacrifice” theme of the original “Rite of Spring.” But at 38 minutes, the work was far too long and also seemed pretentious. The intellectual point was made early on. After a while your attention wandered and when you refocused the experience was like watching paint dry. Still, the work at least had artistic integrity – it was the sincerest and least clever effort of the evening; the purest dance work and the one work least impregnated by the values (or lack of them) of contemporary visual art.
“Folding” was a Tibetan Buddhist inspired spectacle with a score that was generic Brian-Eno-style orientalism interwoven with faux-Tibetan drums, mountain horns and chanting. Six pairs of men and women first trailed red evening dresses (at once Oscar de la Renta and Yellow Hat monk) in slow relays through extremely dim light (again by Tipton), again using the Asian cat-foot glide employed in ”Rite.” As the cacophony of recorded monks’ voices and rumbling drums became louder, three strange hermaphrodite figures entered cloaked in black. Looking closely you realized they were pairs of dancers inside a single black robed costume, their legs hidden, the two individuals moving as one, their torsos arising bare above the gown, and both of their heads crowned by elongated egg-shaped head-dresses. Moving so slowly they made you think of gastropods crossing a beach, they also brought Star Wars and science fiction to mind, an impression reinforced by music here that resembled “2001 Space Odyssey.” Each hermaphrodite pair did a little thing with “itself” – one simulated copulation as the one torso mounted the other on the floor; while another had the male “half” dragging the woman’s torso along.
This activity lasted perhaps ten minutes, but the work had a surprising ending that was the best thing in the entire show. The red monks massed at the rear as the lights dropped even further. Climbing a bleacher that seemed to materialize out of nowhere, and arranging themselves in a pyramidal mass, they seemed to hover in the background like a lineage of Bodhisattvas in a Tibetan Tanka – a tableau vivant to a soundtrack of roaring Om – while the hermaphrodites posed in front. When the lights dropped totally, the audience thought the work was over and began to applaud, despite the fact that the droning music continued. The ritual wasn’t over, though; the lights came back up, the monks descended and joined the hermaphrodites in a line for what normally would have been a curtain call, and the applause continued as they all bowed and undulated to the music, first this way, then that. The “audience participation” was spontaneous and continued for a couple of minutes. Hokey; a cliché cartoon ritual out of “Tintin in Tibet;” and manipulative too at the end – but it worked, entertained, and had some fresh (if too clever) visual and dramatic ideas. The vision of humanity as inhuman and insect-like was evident here as it was in the first work, but was relieved by the Buddhist context.
“Undivided Divided” - concluding the evening - unfortunately took audience participation to an entirely new level. After a thirty-minute interval during which the theater was closed and everyone milled about in the lobby, it filed back in to find the stage reconfigured as a grid of squares, each with Zen calligraphic flourish in the style of Sengai in its middle, and with a semi-nude dancer lying in each square, spot-lit from above. Men and women alike were dressed in nothing but flesh colored underwear and the squares they lay in had corridors running between and around them to permit the audience to wander about and stare from up close, which is just what they did, with comically solemn expressions. (Surely this was the artistic edge; the avant-garde!). Those that remained in the bleachers could contemplate the whole thing – the dancers and the voyeurs, inevitably becoming voyeurs themselves at a second remove. After a while, the dancers rose and twisted about, then lay back down in pools of body paint (shit-brown, blue, yellow and red) and smeared themselves, before joining each other in couples to mix paint by rubbing against each other in various ways. The soundtrack was synthesizer mixed with percussion and scraping sounds like a needle dragged across a record. At the far end of the room you suddenly noticed that several dancers were building constructions of large glass squares, two feet by two, piling them up and climbing on them like a playground. At the conclusion the score turned harmonic and the dancers returned to home bases and twirled.
The piece was utterly cold, facile, cynical, and manipulative; and the nudity was curiously un-sexy. It was like watching another species do something mechanical while a generation of Barnum and Bailey’s proverbial suckers (born just that minute) looked on. It occurred to you that the problem with theater based on edgy gallery art is that so much of the art today is facile and emotionally empty. Joseph Beuy’s 1960’s and 70’s Actionen were the original template for gallery installations of this kind, a form he virtually created and that hugely influenced Pina Bausch’s conceptions of dance and theater. A comparison of Shen Wei’s work with Beuys and Bausch is instructive. Underlying Beuys’ installations was his motto, “Every man is an artist,” a humanistic creed that reasserts the value of individuals in the face of twentieth century German history. Bausch virtually made the motto incarnate on her dancers, presenting them as unforgettably individual and human, while engaging them in dramatic activities that became allegorical. Shen substitutes cleverness for serious engagement and dehumanizes his dancers by presenting them as sexual objects for a discretely leering public. Without the least feeling for what makes people and their nakedness either god-like, vulnerable, or both, it’s merely artistic opportunism. Terribly clever; but you come away thinking here’s a company with a whole lot of money and an artist who’s trying to figure out what he can do next that will make him a star. Try making meaningful work.
Photos of Shen Wei Dance Arts by Stephanie Berger: Top - "Rite of Spring;" Bottom - "Folding"