NEAR THE TERRACE
SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS
AMERICAN DANCE FESTIVAL
DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER
By now, we’ve come to expect choreographer Shen Wei to revise earlier works when he restages them, as the prerogative of an artistic intellect that is never still. Those changes have ranged from the subliminal tweaks we’ve witnessed in versions of Folding to the overt makeover which suggested that, in the first section of his famous trilogy, the incomplete title Re— actually stood for rewriting. (Or, possibly, redaction, when the shattered floor-length mandala which clearly symbolized the Tibetan Buddhist diaspora in the first version of that work was muddied beyond recognition in at least one iteration that followed, before its later reinstatement in recent years.)…
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