This week we’re sharing tributes to the entire 2024 Dance Journal Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, go to retailer.dancemedia.com.
Shen Wei blends artwork kinds 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 provides 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 educated from early childhood within the conventional arts of Chinese language opera, ink portray, and calligraphy. He started fashionable dance coaching on the American Dance Pageant’s program on the Guangdong Dance Academy in China, and in 1991, he turned a founding member of Guangdong Fashionable Dance Firm, the primary skilled fashionable 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, typically eschewing the paintbrush and utilizing elements of his physique to use the paint. He prolonged this technique into a number of choreographic works, through which paint-slathered dancers fill a flooring canvas by way of their dancing.
Shen Wei’s dance approach, which he calls “Pure Physique Improvement,” displays his multicultural, multidimensional understanding of motion, in search of 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 entire—as in his sweeping choreography for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Shen Wei attributes his capability to create total-art experiences to his coaching as a Chinese language opera performer. “We needed to dance, sing, act—the whole lot 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 acquired high-profile commissions and awards and has exhibited his artwork throughout the globe. At present, his affect is as boundaryless as his artwork
