This week we’re sharing tributes to all the 2024 Dance Journal Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, go to retailer.dancemedia.com.
Shen Wei blends artwork types like watercolors. He’s achieved in not simply a number of types of dance but additionally portray, set design, costuming, movie, structure, calligraphy, and poetry—all of which he integrates into his creative apply. “Making artwork offers which means and worth to my life and brings magic to the world,” he says.
Born in Hunan province in 1968 to Chinese language opera professionals, Shen Wei was skilled from early childhood within the conventional arts of Chinese language opera, ink portray, and calligraphy. He started trendy dance coaching on the American Dance Pageant’s program on the Guangdong Dance Academy in China, and in 1991, he grew to become a founding member of Guangdong Fashionable Dance Firm, the primary skilled trendy dance firm in China. In 1995, Shen Wei was awarded a fellowship to review on the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab and moved to New York Metropolis. In July 2000, he based his firm, Shen Wei Dance Arts.
Spending days within the studio dancing and choreographing whereas additionally carving out time for portray, Shen Wei pushed the envelope of physicality in visible artwork, generally eschewing the paintbrush and utilizing components of his physique to use the paint. He prolonged this technique into a number of choreographic works, during which paint-slathered dancers fill a ground canvas by means of their dancing.
Shen Wei’s dance method, which he calls “Pure Physique Growth,” displays his multicultural, multidimensional understanding of motion, searching for to align the human physique’s inner energies with exterior forces. His choreography has a equally built-in imaginative and prescient. Painterly set and costume designs and impressionistic movies typically merge with the dancing to create a unified complete—as in his sweeping choreography for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Shen Wei attributes his potential to create total-art experiences to his coaching as a Chinese language opera performer. “We needed to dance, sing, act—every part associated to the visible arts,” he recounted in a 2016 interview on the Asia Society in New York Metropolis. “I wasn’t taught the humanities individually, so I don’t separate them in my work.”
Shen Wei has obtained high-profile commissions and awards and has exhibited his artwork throughout the globe. In the present day, his affect is as boundaryless as his artwork
