MindScape, a collaboration between the Guangdong Modern Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, held its world premiere at the Guangzhou Opera House in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, on June 5.
The production carries particular significance: thirty years after leaving Guangdong for New York, choreographer and visual artist Shen Wei returned to collaborate with the company where his artistic journey began.
Following the premiere, the production will travel to the American Dance Festival at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, in July and later to Lincoln Center's Summer for the City in Dance Encounters, a new outdoor series, during Chinese Arts Week in New York from July 22-25.
MindScape is the latest chapter in Shen's decades-long artistic exploration, blending modern dance with poetry, painting, calligraphy, and live music. But this work is perhaps one of his most introspective yet, drawing on the philosophical ideals of Chinese literati and the spiritual pursuit of harmony between humanity and nature.
"MindScape is about my inner landscape," said Shen in an earlier interview.
"It reflects how I face life — success, hardship, and the balance needed to keep moving forward. This series is about the power of thought and spirit over material concerns."
"The project also makes traditional instruments feel contemporary, fresh and pleasurable."
The production merges traditional Chinese music with contemporary soundscapes, featuring guqin (a seven-stringed Chinese zither) virtuoso Zhao Xiaoxia, xiao (Chinese vertical bamboo flute) player Liu Xiaogang, percussionist Chen Shijie, and electronic music.
"Unlike many of Shen Wei's earlier works that explore the relationship between humanity, culture and the cosmos, MindScape turns inward. Structured as a meditation on the human psyche, the work asks a fundamental question: how do we encounter our inner world?" commented Chen Ruohan, a dance studies PhD and lecturer at Guangzhou Sport University.
Twelve dancers from China and abroad move through a landscape shaped by live music, imagery, and evolving spatial design. Their choreography blends contemporary dance vocabulary with subtle traces of Chinese movement aesthetics, creating what feels less like a narrative and more like a prose poem written by the body.
One of the production's most compelling features is its use of real-time video projection. Overhead cameras transform dancers into shifting patterns of color, geometry and motion, blurring the boundary between dance and visual art.
Later, dancers become literal painters, leaving traces of pigment across the stage. In this segment, painting is not a separate artistic medium but an extension of movement itself — a record of physical presence unfolding in real time.
"The final section offers the work's emotional culmination. What emerges is not a traditional image of mountains and rivers, but a collective landscape created through shared action, memory and perception. The resulting artwork serves as a living archive of the dancers' movements, emphasizing process over product, and experience over representation," wrote Chen.
MindScape exemplifies Shen's vision, where dance remains the central language while expanding into music, painting, film, and space. Its greatest achievement lies not in presenting a finished artistic object, but in inviting audiences to experience perception itself as a creative act.
"Movements blend contemporary dance vocabulary with traces of Chinese aesthetics. In the first half, subdued colors and slow, restrained gestures evoke a springtime of inner energy — like tai chi hands, in which strength flows gradually from body to body," reviewed audience member, Lan Ying.
"Audience members sensed not only visual beauty but a continuous circulation of qi: music, breath and movement intertwined to create a shared energy."
In the second half, color, movement and scale burst outward. Dancers donned high-saturation unitards, leaped, spun, and rolled, while small windmills — and eventually a gigantic white windmill — translated internal forces into visible phenomena.
Audience reflections emphasize that these props did more than illustrate wind; they materialized the awakening of inner vitality, allowing the invisible to become perceptible. Music, light and motion merged to create a continuous flow of shared perception, moving the performance from the inner world to collective expression.
The finale fused bodies and paint in a live creation. Each performance is unique: a meticulously choreographed production that yields spontaneous, unrepeatable traces of energy.
"As audience members observed, the true work of art is not the final painting but the collective experience — the breath, the wind, the flowing pigments, the resonance of drum, flute, and guqin — converging at that moment of creation," wrote Lan Ying.
