Tibet, Angkor Wat and China's Silk Road are the inspiration behind this trilogy from New York based Chinese choreographer Shen Wei. These moving, transcendent stories of spiritual and geographic homecoming are told through breathtaking and bold movement, music and visuals.
Re- (I): Set to haunting traditional Tibetan chants, this deeply personal, almost spiritual, dance draws on Shen Wei's time on the dizzying heights of the Tibetan plateau. A massive circular pattern made of confetti-like paper covers the stage floor. The design is slowly, deliberately destroyed as the dancers sweep and glide around the space, providing an ever-shifting setting literally scored by their movements. Read more …
Re- (II): Shen Wei creates a fluid, dynamic dance inspired by his time spent in Cambodia. The soundtrack mixes his own field recordings from Cambodian villages and temples with indigenous folk music and John Tavener's Tears of the Angels as his dancers create an immersive, atmospheric world of twisted, knotted banyan trees and lost temples, deep in the jungle.
Re- (III): The dance grows to a frenetic pace as Shen Wei celebrates China's vast mix of languages, religions and cultural histories, and juxtaposes them against a China of the future - a 21st-century exporter of goods, ideas and populations. Dancers vibrate with kinetic energy across the stage, driven into electrifying action by David Lang's fizzing electronic soundscape.
Please note this show contains partial nudity.
Dance trilogy Re-Triptych journeys from Tibet to China at 2011 EIF
Shen Wei Dance Arts perform Re-Triptych at 2011 Edinburgh International Festival
The art of body language
Edinburgh Playhouse, Edinburgh from Thursday September 1, 2011, until Saturday September 3, 2011. More info: www.edinburghplayhouse.org.uk