A painter’s eye for steps

NOT unlike a Ferrari -- exotic, elegant and known for a high-velocity cruising capacity -- choreographer, dancer, painter and designer Shen Wei has been on a wild ride. Born in southeastern China during the Cultural Revolution, the slightly built Shen trained as a boy to become a Chinese opera performer. But by the time he was 27, he was creating dances, and in a distinctly contemporary idiom. Then, offered the chance to study in the U.S., he moved to New York City, unwittingly took up residence where drugs were the chief attraction -- and has since taken the modern dance world by storm.

As he stands on the empty stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, visibly smitten with its vast expanse, you can almost see Shen’s synapses firing. Like an artist contemplating a canvas before applying that first splash of color, he ponders the space that his 3-year-old company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, will inhabit Friday and Saturday as part of its first large-scale tour.In one of the more anticipated local debuts of recent years, Shen arrives with fistfuls of accolades, especially for his rendering of Igor Stravinsky’s iconic “Rite of Spring.” The attention grabber of last year’s Lincoln Center Festival -- New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff called it an “action painting come to life” -- Shen’s “Rite” is performed on a 42-by-46-foot geometric painting created by the choreographer.

Against this suggestion of a surreal chessboard, the work represents a wedding of Shen’s choreographic and painterly sensibilities. As a dozen dancers -- their poker faces tinted chalk-white -- sway and twitch in gray and black costumes that Shen also designed, his “Rite” brings postmodernism into the 21st century.

“There is a gambling quality in that moment of live experience,” Shen says in heavily accented English. The ballet “is different every performance, though it’s constructed in the studio. I want to see the work in that moment, in that time.”

You might say such expectations come naturally to Shen, now 35, whose beatific face and placid demeanor belie his fiercely held convictions about art and its place in the world. He was born into an artistic family in Xian Ying, a town in China’s Hunan province. And because his father was a performer and director in the Hunan Xian opera tradition, Shen, who had studied calligraphy as a child, obliged his family and was admitted to the opera department of the Hunan Arts School in 1978, after the Cultural Revolution.

During a grueling six-year training regimen, he was immersed in the arts. For some 15 hours a day, he studied acting, movement, dance, acrobatics, singing and speaking. In 1984, at age 16, he joined his father’s company, fully believing, he says, that he would spend his life there. But within a few years, he attended a modern dance concert by a Canadian troupe, and the experience changed his life.

By 1991, he had hooked up with a group of performers who wanted to break out of traditional careers. He became a founding member of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China’s first such troupe. He also began choreographing for the company, while soaking up as much as he could about modern dance by reading and watching videos of the works of Paul Taylor, Pina Bausch and Martha Graham.

A quick study, he was awarded first prize in 1994 for both choreography and performance at China’s inaugural National Modern Dance Competition. The following year, by then decidedly on the fast track, he received a scholarship in the U.S. from the pioneering Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab, where choreographers Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis combined elaborate lighting and scenic effects with movement. That scholarship brought him to Manhattan, which he since has called home and unequivocally adores.

“New York,” he says, “is a world in a small version. There are so many cultures and different tastes and so many new arts. I began thinking, ‘How can I find my own way?’ It is intense, and things go really fast.”

A metaphor, as it were, for Shen’s new life, one in which he taught himself English and lived in a building that was a magnet for drug dealers. (He since has moved but, in keeping with his Zen-like philosophy, says he never feared or judged his neighbors, accepting them instead as fellow “human beings.”)

Meanwhile, he continued to absorb as much culture as possible. He particularly cites movies, especially Federico Fellini’s (he says he’s seen “Satyricon” 10 times), and the paintings of Francis Bacon. Both were to be powerful influences on his work.

Health problems led to serenity

In 1999, Shen -- who says he never smoked cigarettes or did drugs and can barely finish one glass of wine -- began to have difficulty breathing. His heart, he learned, was beating 220 times a minute -- a physical manifestation, he says, of “living in a place like New York City.”

It took surgery to correct the problem, but his restored health brought with it a new serenity. Two years later, he felt sufficiently confident to recruit dancers from China and the North Carolina-based American Dance Festival, where he had been invited to choreograph beginning in 1995, and form Shen Wei Dance Arts. He says merging his skills in dance, theater, Chinese opera and painting with a troupe of cherry-picked performers enabled his vision to take flight.

“I think I am one human being with one brain,” he explains. But “I need another 12 brains -- they are my dancers.”

Shen says his dancers must, like him, receive ample exposure to the arts. “In painting,” he points out, “they learn where to put a flower, an orange, an apple. I recommend for each dance I do that they research. I bring an entire suitcase full of books for them to understand what I’m talking about.”

Shen says he first heard Stravinsky’s “Rite” on the radio when he was in opera school. “I was so drawn to it, I knew that one day I wanted to make a piece with it,” he recalls. But like Paul Taylor before him, he chose to set not Stravinsky’s orchestral score but the composer’s two-piano reduction. And though the dancers leap, twirl and tumble in response to the vibrant polyrhythms, there also are moments of complete stillness -- a device Shen attributes to his Chinese ancestry.

Dancers emoting, he says, is not what his work is about. “One of the things I discuss with the dancers is, ‘I don’t want you to show how you feel.’ And they don’t pretend or play to the audience. If passions come out, this is not what I’m doing.”

That works fine for dancer Sara Procopio, who has been with the company since its inception and says she finds Shen’s choreographic approach continuously fascinating.

“The in-depth exploration of concepts and ideas is as exciting as it is exhausting,” she says. “Working with him, I have been constantly challenged to push into new territory, to go places -- physically and artistically -- I couldn’t imagine.”

There’s no doubt that the world Shen creates is distinctive. The mesmerizing “Folding,” also on the Dorothy Chandler bill, is a work he created in 2000 for Guangdong. The title refers, in part, to the elegant draping of fabric, and Shen creates a haunting, mystical tableau -- a stage bathed in blue against an aquatic backdrop of three fish, based on an 18th century Chinese painting.

Dancers sporting beehive-like headdresses and clad in scarlet demi-ballgowns float across the floor, their trains swirling. Shen also injects a butoh element, with the dancers moving achingly slowly. And he himself performs a riveting solo that emphasizes his malleable upper torso.

“Who said we have to dance in this way, or train in that way, the way it was maybe a long time ago?” Shen muses. “It’s a new century, and people have different lives. Everything’s changing. And dance has to be different in the way it’s presented on stage. I want to find more space to communicate, to develop a new way with the audience.”

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A look at others on the ‘Rite’ track

The year was 1913; the city, Paris. The cause for commotion -- indeed, a full-blown riot? Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of “Le Sacre du Printemps,” set to a raucous score by Igor Stravinsky. And although it’s been nearly 100 years since, the legendary score, which critics retitled “Massacre du Printemps,” continues to inspire choreographers.

Although an exact count of “Rites” is difficult to calculate, the number probably hovers around 100. Among the choreographers who have tested their mettle against Stravinsky’s frenzy-inducing rhythms was Leonide Massine, whose staging in 1920 was sponsored by Coco Chanel and was said to have been preferred to the original by the composer. In 1959, Maurice Bejart replaced the dance of the Chosen One with the ritual mating of a young man and woman. Three years later, Kenneth MacMillan made a version for the Royal Ballet.

In 1987, the Joffrey Ballet reintroduced the world to Nijinsky’s footwork after Millicent Hodson spent 16 years on its reconstruction. And the dances kept coming: In 1988, Molissa Fenley opted for a one-woman version that proved to be an endurance test; in 2001, France’s Ballet Preljocaj crafted a raw incarnation accentuated with nudity; and, adding to the allure of Stravinsky’s staccato pulsings, Zingaro, a French theater group, choreographed “Rite” for a bevy of prancing horses.

Beginning with the original, here’s a handful of the notables who have tackled the “Rite”:

Vaslav Nijinsky, 1913: His two-act, rule-busting ballet features 47 dancers, including maidens, elders and the virginal Chosen One, tapped to dance herself to death for the sake of the tribe. The ballet is dropped from the repertory after five performances in Paris and three in London.

Pina Bausch, 1975: Balancing realism with abstraction, Bausch’s dancers perform to the orchestral score on a stage covered in soft black earth. The final image of the maiden lurching face forward to the floor, accompanied by Stravinsky’s crashing chord, is wrenching.

Paul Taylor, 1980 : In “Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal),” set to Stravinsky’s two-piano score, Taylor parodies the Diaghilev/Nijinsky staging. The work, shifting between a rehearsal studio and a gangster tale, features multiple stabbings, a private eye, a crook and Keystone Kop-like figures.

Martha Graham, 1984: After dancing the Chosen One in Massine’s “Rite” in 1930, the doyenne of modern dance, at age 90, choreographs her own variation. But her usual approach -- transforming despair into psychological release -- is generally considered less successful, with drama in surprisingly short supply.

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Shen Wei Dance Arts

When: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

Price: $15-$50

Contact: (213) 972-0711