artistic neuroscience

Shen Wei Dance Arts painted and played Connect Transfer at the Kennedy Center this weekend. In the open space of the Concert Hall, the performance connected senses and worked across specific to abstract in an intriguing externalization of the human brain.

In caricature, ballet is about the air, and modern dance is about the floor. Shen Wei’s company connected to the floor with lines and strokes. Even when the dancers were moving with their torsos against the floor, energy flowed out of their arms and legs, pulling them across the floor. The movement had the earthliness of modern dance, but rather than with the weight of limbs and steps, it imaged neurons firing.

Cross-sensory effects shape the performance. In an interview for Dance Umbrella in October, 2007, Shen Wei explained:

Sometimes you hear a sound and you may see an image. Sometimes you see a movement and you feel its speed. You see the movement and hear the sound as well. … When I see a physical movement, it’s important at the same time to keep my others senses open — my ears, my feelings, my touch. That way I might understand how I can deepen all of the elements of my experience.

The human neural system integrates sensory modalities across all stages of sensory processing. Connect Transfer abstractly enacts those processes.

The work also images calligraphy being written and written characters unraveling and reforming. About a third of the way through, a single dancer wearing a single, slightly extended, gloved sponge soaked in black paint brushes through the space with circular movements within traveling floorwork. The image of the movement is brush strokes of calligraphy. At one point, the music stops and floor microphones bring out the sound of the dancer’s brushing. Nonetheless, much of the movement that evokes brushwork occurs up from brushing paint on the floor. The play of senses and abstraction in brush-movement is an intriguing aspect of the work.

The floor painting was not just a product of brushing. Moving on the floor, the dancer’s tights acquired paint and transfered paint. So did their feet. One dancer had one bare hand painted red. Her painted hand created some hand stencils on the floor like those of cave art dating back about 30,000 years. In their diversity of forms and scales, and in the sense of purposive actions and chance occurrences, the resulting paintings are much more evocative of a biological system than abstract expressionist paintings.

The part of Connect Transfer that I liked least was the personal seal that Shen Wei danced. This was done in a spotlight in front-center stage, twice, to very different music. It included the only movement directed through a dancer’s eyes. Some of the movement seemed to be body-builder camp. Connect Transfer as a whole contained little parody or irony. But for me, Shen Wei’s seal evoked, intentionally or not, a parody of the egotistical artist.

More ambitious staging might better mark the trajectory of the performance and enlarge the sense of the artistic process. Why not pull the canvas out from under the dancers after they have worked on it for awhile? With the canvas as a back drop, the percussive section of the performance might use movement patterned on finger painting and dabbing of thick, oil-based paint. Then maybe move the canvas above them. And, with a sufficiently translucent canvas, why not finish with a section that has the artists dancing behind their work? Such staging might shift some of the work from the brain to more accessible, personal artistic experience.