I spent part of the third section of Shen Wei’s modern dance showing at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday watching a shoeless young woman (a member of the audience who was, like me, allowed to wander along the grid of 60 dancer-inhabited squares of performance space), stare slack-jawed and wide-eyed at the topless performers smeared with paint leaping and spinning and writhing before her. Her proximity to them was probably jarring enough, but add to that experience the intimidating vastness of the Armory’s coliseum-sized hangar with booming surround sound and a reverberating floor, and its easy to see why someone might drop all pretense of understanding and question what’s expected of them.
Joe Pan
Joe Pan grew up along the Space Coast of Florida and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His debut poetry book, Autobiomythography & Gallery, was named “Best First Book of the Year” by Coldfront magazine. His work has appeared in such places as Artworld, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Greensboro Review, Glimmer Train and The New York Times. He is the founder of Brooklyn Arts Press, an independent publishing house, and lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.