With Shen Wei, it’s ‘Let’s get visual’

Rigorously stylized and modulated contemporary dancing dominated by a sophisticated sense of spatial design: That’s Shen Wei Dance Arts, the New York-based company that made its local debut on Friday with a two-part program at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Both of the Chinese-born choreographer’s pieces began with ceremonial entrances, conveying a concept of the stage as a special and perhaps sacred place. Both also imposed a kind of sexless abstraction on the 12-member company, though “Folding” did rely on conventional partnering relationships: men lifting women.

However, in “Folding” all the dancers wore flowing gowns, beehive or melon headpieces and lots of body paint, neutralizing their individuality as much as possible and subordinating them to a painterly vision in which Shen Wei’s gray-on-gray setting (inspired by an 18th century Chinese watercolor) mattered every bit as much as the dancers’ measured, serpentine processions.

Capped by a flowing solo by Shen Wei himself, the work remained slow, solemn, meticulously controlled and exquisitely attuned to the shifting textures of its accompaniment: taped music by John Tavener, mixed with Tibetan bells and ritual chant. But quickly an odd torpor set in: a feeling that we weren’t watching dance at all but some kind of gallery installation.

Like Taiwanese choreographer Lin Hwai-min of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, British modernist Siobhan Davies and too many midranked others, Shen Wei seems to approach dance as a visual art -- and it isn’t. It’s a physical art, one that may bedazzle us visually but achieves its deepest impact when it stimulates our muscle-memories, our body awareness or kinetic subconscious, if you like.

Without that dimension, it soon palls, no matter how gorgeously designed -- and this factor proved especially troublesome in Shen Wei’s “Rite of Spring,” a choreographic abstraction set to Fazil Say’s passionate four-hand piano recording.

Amplification made the pianism seem louder than the orchestral original had sounded in the Pavilion when the Joffrey Ballet performed the 1913 Vaslav Nijinsky “Rite” last summer. But Shen Wei retreated from its dynamism, either having the dancers individually jump and sprawl -- like puppets yanked from on high -- when the rhythms became overwhelming or else just stand and let the music wash over them, responding to its force only with the tiniest hand spasms.

It wasn’t enough. Stravinsky doesn’t really need a sacrificial virgin at such moments, and the greatest “Rite” choreographers (including Nijinsky) have responded by suspending their narratives to emphasize sheer kinesthetic abstraction.

Shen Wei just couldn’t compete here, not even with his impressive gray floor painting and skilled, selfless company. With no contact between dancers, and only a few moments that marshaled the full cast’s energy in a single effect or image, his “Rite” became a collage of small excellences and isolated oddities (the passage of four-legged animal motion, for instance).

Obsessed with panoramic theatrical design, this “Rite of Spring” couldn’t have been more different from the talky Michael Sakamoto version, which played Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica the same weekend and focused on four obsessive characters.

Each took Stravinsky’s mighty score in a provocative direction to something like a dead-end, ultimately failing to physicalize its extremes and grimly confirming the adage that two wrongs don’t make a “Rite.”