UNTITLED NO. 12-2 (2015) 

Concept, Choreography, and Costume Design: Shen Wei

Music: Echoes from the Gorge by Chou Wen-Chung

Sound Design: Metronome Collage by Shen Wei, played live by the dancers

Lighting Design: Christina Watanabe-Jensen

Select Projection Images from: Shen Wei’s Black, White, and Gray Painting Series (2013-2014)

Running Time: 20 minutes

Jointly Commissioned by: Spoleto Festival USA and American Dance Festival

Untitled No. 12-2 is a re-imagining of the site-specific work, Untitled #12-1, presented at the Miami Dade College Museum of Art + Design, where dancers performed alongside Shen Wei’s most recent painting series, Black, White, and Gray. While these paintings are abstract, shapes and forms suggestive of a sublime landscape seem to appear from the thick layering of oil and acrylic on canvas. In this dance, Shen sought to create movement from his painting process, manifesting the sweep, flow, and dynamism of his canvases corporeally, while setting dancers amidst his swirling projected landscapes. There are eleven untitled paintings in Black, White, and Gray; Untitled No. 12-2 is the twelfth painting, as it were, manifested on the proscenium stage. For this work, Shen Wei further developed and re-envisioned his Museum exploration for the proscenium stage, forging a repertory work where the body, itself, paints the space.

Press/Reviews

“…A staggeringly beautiful synthesis of Shen Wei’s ideas about visual and kinetic mark-making...The dancers activate the stage space like breathing nature embodied...Untitled No. 12-2 is the most entrancing of Shen Wei’s works to date, with the most profound emotional impact.”
—Kate Dobbs Ariail, The Five Point Star

“If dance is the art form of bodies moving to music, then Shen Wei Dance Arts goes beyond dance to create a new awareness of how audiences see movement...Each new physical progression in Untitled seems to push dance as a medium a little further, reworking the human anatomy in space, one step at a time.”
—Stephanie Burg, The Post and Courier

“...An entirely surprising performance of the unfamiliar...There is a conversation of visual and performance art on stage, one informed by the other, and brilliantly so.”
—Stacy Huggins, Art Mag

“In the new work, dancers didn’t need any paint. In Shen’s choreography, they “painted” the space with their bodies’ movements.”
—Susan Broili, The Herald Sun

“His eye for beauty misses no detail...I would be happy to remain in the dreamy beautiful world created by Shen Wei.”
—Denise Cerniglia, Arts View NC