What would be your advice to young dancers who want to dance for Shen Wei someday?
Of course any opportunity to see the company or take a workshop is a wonderful way to introduce yourself to the movement and start exploring it on your own body. But I think one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself as a dancer is to go above and beyond to make yourself comfortable in your own skin. To take the time and give yourself the freedom and trust to discover who you are as an artist and to offer that uniqueness to the people you work with, while still providing an open palette of possibility for their own artistic input. I think the combination of individuality and openness in a dancer can make the creative process and working relationship really exciting and fruitful for any choreographer (and any dancer as well).
What drew you to Shen Wei’s work? What makes him unique to work with as a choreographer?
Something that continually draws me into Shen Wei’s work is the way he develops the aesthetic of each piece. For me there is a kind of intoxicating fullness to the worlds he creates on stage, an environment that he constructs visually, musically and physically in the sensibility of the movement that makes me really sink into what’s going on. So there’s something very tangible about the specific world of each piece, but the worlds retain their abstractness…so that you’re never crossing the line into a familiar world, or a place that you could describe easily with words we use every day in the environment around us. It’s very satisfying and stimulating for me to be drawn in that way, both as an audience member and a performer.
How did you first get into dancing?
I started as a small tyke tumbling around in gymnastics classes and then caught the ballet bug when my older sister starting taking classes at a studio back home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I remember hanging on the door outside her classes and hopping around, just itching to get in there. And it’s been a passion that has kept me itching and hopping ever since!
What is your training background?
I studied ballet with Gisela Genschow in Santa Fe for 13 years and towards the end of high school I got a little more exposure to modern dance and became really interested in learning more about that kind of movement sensibility and was very fortunate to have many wonderful teachers in Santa Fe and in college at Tisch who gave me more and more tools for exploring the sensation of movement outside of a ballet structure. But I mean, I love ballet. It’s an intelligence and a physical engagement that I will always really value and enjoy investing in. And I love taking ballet class with the information that I’ve gained as a modern dancer. The lines are really not so concrete for me…there’s a happy blurring in there when you can just start to approach things as movement rather than as a codified, rigid “technique”.
What is the most challenging thing about being a Shen Wei dancer?
Ah, big question! I think, for me, one of the most challenging aspects is being fully, vigorously honest with the physical tone or quality of Shen Wei’s movement while still finding personal ownership of it. It’s never a situation of “Look at me…I am Cecily doing this movement”. It’s “Look at this movement, look at this physical construct, look at the situation this movement puts my body in” and the challenge comes in investing so purely and honestly in that physical situation that it then becomes something that is a full expression of me without an active imposition of myself onto the movement.
What song or piece of music makes you want to get up and dance?
YMCA.
Just kidding.
If you weren’t a dancer, what do you think you would do with your life?
Well, I am continually humbled and awed by the knowledge that I have a relationship with my career that is guided by passion first and foremost. And although I’m not honestly sure what specifically my life might be like, or will be like, when for whatever reason my relationship with dance isn’t what it is now, my hope and goal is that my relationship with passion will still be the guiding force. So that whatever the next step is, it is a step guided by passion and because of that it will be a step that brings as many gifts and challenges and adventures as dance has brought to my life as it exists right now.
What are some of your interests other than dance?
Well, I really love words. And languages. And the inherent complexities and rules there. I also love cooking (although I am fully aware that love does not automatically connotate talent!) and I enjoy travel. Honestly, it’s a pretty open book and I’m not sure what world will crack open for me after dance but I am excited to learn it…whatever it is.
