Shen Wei Dance Arts review: 'Cube' moves

Photo: Zoe Liu

Shen Wei Dance Arts review: 'Cube' moves

Chinese-born choreographer Shen Wei is known for both vast spectacle, including the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and quiet, introspective works. His "Undivided Divided," which had its West Coast premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum on Thursday night, has intriguing elements of both, yet it sometimes felt remote.

There's no sitting throughout the 35-minute piece, which is part installation, part performance art. Instead the audience wanders through a six-by-six grid of 36 squares - some simple panels on the floor and others occupied by clear plastic cubes, or large frames filled with elastic cords or strange hairy stuff. Eighteen men and women, all supine on individual panels and clad only in nude-colored briefs, begin shifting as an original sound score by So Percussion fills the air.

Though the movement is sometimes muscular and tense and other times wildly impulsive, each dancer nevertheless remains tightly contained within the "cube" of space, rarely breaking the plane between us and them. Midway through the piece, the dancers cross over to other squares, where they reel and writhe in small splashes of bright paint, smearing color over themselves, the panels, the textured fluff, the plastic walls of structures that look like greenhouses. One man tangles his limbs in the web of elastic cords that stretch across a frame, while another climbs to a precarious perch atop stacks of plastic cubes.

If the dancers are confined to the positive space, the audience moves through the darkness of the negative space freely as they dance.

The initial reaction is how appealing and slightly voyeuristic it feels to walk among such beautiful bodies. The close quarters allows you to examine their remarkably confident dancing in detail, to study the tension of muscles and the fragility of balances.

When all the dancers stop in a sculptural contrapposto pose with one arm raised, a glance around the room reveals that we are suddenly amid a forest of elegant branches. Standing among the performers in these moments of synchronicity, a powerful current of focused artistic consonance runs throughout the crowd.

It's intriguing too to consider the watchers as part of the performance. Which observers hang to the periphery and who prefers to walk among the squares? The audience itself moves in interesting, unchoreographed ways as viewers try simultaneously to avoid touching each other and keep from falling into the paint-covered squares. And the performers are close, sometimes closer than you realize. At any given moment you might be watching someone on one panel and turn to find yourself unnervingly close to another dancer behind you.

Yet despite the intimacy of these close quarters, the dancers might look directly at you, but it doesn't feel as if they intend to engage, and there is something clinical about that. "Undivided Divided" is beautiful, enormously striking visually, but doesn't venture further to hit viscerally.

Here we stand, closer than we would ever be in a traditional theatrical presentation, and yet instead of evoking a kind of immediacy and passion, there is cool detachment as each of us meanders on our own.