Dancing on the (cutting) edge

The future of dance showed up at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

But not on a track, diving platform or gym floor. It appeared in a bird’s nest – Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium, where the Games were opened last Aug. 8 with a monumental, dreamlike vision made up of moving bodies, a vision that awed the world. It was choreographed and designed by Shen Wei. 

It’s talent like Shen Wei’s that Charles Reinhart  sees as the next step in dance’s creative development. Reinhart, longtime director of the American Dance Festival at Duke University in Durham, N.C., believes individual genius is more important than experiments with style and approach in the progress of art. 

Charles Reinhart

In fact, Reinhart thinks dance is having a sort of success problem: The art form has expanded so rapidly, with new talent popping up in so many new places around the world, that’s it’s hard to keep up with. 

And it’s the talent itself that will take dance to its next level, he said. “Once you’ve found the talent, you back it, no matter what direction it’s taking.” 

 That includes Shen Wei. As head of the ADF, it’s Reinhart’s mission to discover and nurture new individual artists and companies and explore fresh dimensions of dance. In addition to the annual festival at Duke - a six-week  intensive school, dance laboratory and showcase for noted and emerging companies and choreographers – ADF leads projects in other nations. In 1987, the ADF went to Guangzhou, China, to teach local students, some of whom went on to create China’s first modern-dance company. Shen Wei was one of them.

When the young choreographer immigrated to the U.S. in 1995 to study at the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab, the ADF invited Shen Wei into its International Choreographers Commissioning Program. Five years later, at the 2000 festival, he founded his current company, Shen Wei Dance Arts.  

2008 American Dance Festival/Sara D. Davis. "Connect Transfer" by Shen Wei

Even as one of Reinhart’s two-per-decade stars of choreography, Shen Wei is unusual, the director said. “Each of his pieces has been dramatically different” from all the others, with no recurring themes or stylistic motifs.

“It might be humanly impossible to keep going on that way,” said Reinhart with a laugh.

But if Shen Wei’s works themselves have no unifying theme, his highly theatrical vision suggests one: Reinhart sees the melding of theater and dance movement and also the closer coming-together of ballet and modern styles as two trends shaping the dance frontier.  

The 2009 festival will look into that rapprochement of  styles, with ballet companies performing modern choreography and panels scheduled to explore the ramifications of the blend. For 2010, Reinhart said, “one of the ideas we’re thinking about … is to look at where theater and dance come together.”

That combination isn’t new – many contemporary dance companies stress the theatrical side of their art by adding “dance theater” to their names and creating choreography with a visual narrative to it. Reinhart particularly cited the work of Twyla Tharp, who has worked directly with theater artists such as director Andre Gregory and who choreographed the dialogue-free Broadway musical based on Billy Joel’s pop songs, “Movin’ Out.” Reinhart especially liked that – “The story is so clear through the movement,” he noted.

But even though they’re not revolutionary, Reinhart thinks such combinations are more frequent than they used to be, as if old barriers are falling for good. It’s like what’s happening between the ballet and modern camps, he said. When he started in dance, people assumed that a dancer trained in one technique could not perform the other.

Now, ”the whole educational system has changed,” he said, “so they’re much more versatile.”   

Pulling down the barriers lets dancers and choreographers be more creative, too. 

 ”We’re talking about a [dance] world where the wars have kind of dissipated,” Reinhart said. “I think that’s healthy.”                          

Video: Shen Wei in residence at Duke University, January 2009