Shen Wei Dance Arts
By Doug Weaver

If I were an visitor from another planet and just happened to land inside the Disney Concert Hall Friday night in time to watch Shen Wei Dance Arts' "Connect Transfer," I'd come away thinking that humans were an intensely talented and intelligent race committed to solving one of the most ubiquitous problems in the artistic community of modern times: how to successfully meld the disparate worlds of music, dance and painting into a form that was not only palatable, but enjoyable by the most people.

Choreographer Shen Wei's Dance Arts Company, coupled with the amazing Flux Quartet and the spell-binding pianist, Gloria Cheng have done just that, though.

In shades of black, white and gray, Shen Wei's minimalist, impossibly lithe, genderless-appearing dancers laid down the ground rules for their concert: one by one, like lone statements of a great fugue, the dancers silently introduced them-selves with alien-like grace and an unassailable coincidence, then disappeared, only to reappear in couples, their bodies intertwining in impossible knots, suggesting an impending complexity. Not only was this going to be a virtuoso exhibition exploring relationships between dancers, but their ability in conveying with absolute certainty that what they (we) were going to hear (as evidenced by the Flux Quartet and Ms. Cheng poised to begin playing) was going to be faithfully reflected in their movements. No small task.

Then the music began.

Beginning with Kevin Volans' exquisite "String Quartet No. 6," the dancers lay down onto the white canvas floor curlicues from mittens full of black paint. It almost seemed as though one shouldn't be privy to this process that was similar to a child spying the early-morning patt-erns and trails left on his dew-covered lawn by something or so-meone unseen during the night, a process rend-ered magical by childhood's innocence. The music here was reminiscent of Debussy's "Sun-ken Cathedral," with its tweaking of known sha-pes on dry land into something still recognizable - and beautiful -- underwater. Shen Wei's use of only black paint here would portend wondrous results at the end of the concert, as it delineated the music's lush tonal themes.

Then Mr. Wei's choice of Iannis Xanakis' "Everyali," and Gyorgy Ligeti's "Sonatina: II - Andante, Monument, In zart fleissender Bewegung," were telling. Arguably the most eso-teric music in existence, the-se notes wer-en't composed for "easy listen-ing" by the masses. Indeed, Xan-akis himself held the lis-tening public in open contempt and by his own admission wrote music that was so complex, that it would be acc-essible to only those within a heady group of intellectuals in music schools and conser-vatories arou-nd the world.

To borrow a phrase that has been used to condemn modern music for decades, this music was quintessentially "atonal and dysjunct," and Shen Wei's dancers rose to the occasion, madly appearing, flitting across the white stage, congealing into lumps, then separating into endless shapes.

The music took on the energy of an unstoppable locomotive - a great engine of destruction - as the dancers seemed as droplets of water randomly flung into a huge pan of boiling oil, shooting and jutting in unpredictable directions, all with unyielding vitality. They never tired. Watching these dancers was similar to watching with wonder the en`dless invention of computer-generated fractal designs: some-thing exquisite grows from absolutely nothing…and continues into infinity.

By now red paint has been introduced, and the black and gray costumes of the dancers are no longer pristine, but battle scarred with color. Likewise, the once purely whi-te canvass of the stage seemed littered with casualties of conflict: blotches of black and red softened here and there with footprints of gray and pink.

Ms. Cheng seems to do battle with a recording of a second piano, as Ligeti's composition is for two pianos and she is by herself. He has written music as great slabs of sound that find themselves reflected in impolite globs of color on stage.

Then the short (hour-long) concert ended, and I must confess I just got goose bumps thinking about it. Like an old and dear friend, and seemingly with no effort whatsoever, the quietly lush theme of Volans' "Quartet" reappeared accompanied with the color blue - then several shades of blue, as the dancers effortlessly rolled and somersaulted, daubing and smearing shapes - then yellow and orange and green, a seeming perfect interpretation of the music, at first merely beautiful, was transformed exponentially: the effect was abs-olutely spellbinding.

If you hadn't guessed, I enjoyed this performance a lot. The Disney Concert Hall remains one of the world's greatest venues, and the powers that be deserve a pat on the back for departing from strictly music and allowing such a remarkable performance of dance to grace its stage.