March, 2019

A couple of years ago Wen Wei Wang made a dance called Dialogue, for six male dancers. It was about ways that we make contact with each other—or don’t. The piece threw a transformative cloak of grace and order over roughshod male energy and competition.
Now he has made Ying Yun, for five female dancers. They are not at all alike, these pieces, and yet they have a similarity, and that similarity is in their generosity and understanding of what it is to be human. They render visible the idea of souls unbound.
As a dancer, Wen Wei Wang always commanded the stage with disciplined power and inherent elegance, a coiled, oiled versatility that was a product of his background (his upbringing in China, and his experience as a dancer in styles ranging from Peking opera and Chinese ballet to a wide range of Western contemporary movement).
That breadth of experience in life and art inevitably shapes his expression as a choreographer. He respects and celebrates the individual and shows us what it is like to be truly free in the body. Being free in the body is not as easy as it might sound. And it is a paradox of sorts that this sense we get of meeting individuals at their most liberated—souls unbound—is founded on the controlled elegance and restrained power that so distinguished his performance.
The new piece investigates the lifelong influence of what he calls his close affinity with femininity and womanhood. It is dedicated to his late mother—the title, Ying Yun, is his mother’s name: Ying, he tells us, could mean hero, and Yun indicates clouds. Because of this, we are bound to be looking and listening for references to his Chinese background, and we can fancy we hear them occasionally in the street sounds on the soundtrack. We might also imagine her spirit in the projected image of a glowing sun-circle that dominates the stage for a time then diminishes to a tiny ball of glowing defiance.

As always with his work, we see a range of influences from his dancing career (ballet tropes: the dying swan, the impossibly beautiful princess) along with the torqued joints, deep, powerful squats, leaps and lunges and swirls of the modernists. The bodies of the dancers imbue this movement with an aura of the feminine—soft power, controlled with a restraint and discipline reminiscent of the work and teaching of his mentor and partner, the late Grant Strate: a solemn, alert grace.

There is generally something heroic going on in Wen Wei Wang’s work, in the sense that we witness the human creature striving nobly; it is evident here in the sustained poise and exquisite control of these women as they push to their expressive limits. We see them as confident individuals, collaborating, respecting each other’s beings, admitting us to human truths through human movement: the same grace beyond gender that we saw in Dialogue. Together on a single bill these pieces would make a powerful pairing.