Re-Triptych, Shen Wei Dance Arts, Playhouse, Edinburgh

Shen Wei is only 43, but he’s packed an epic amount into his career. A child sent from home aged nine to study opera; an emigrant to New York; a return to China to choreograph the Beijing Olympics. His urge to put this extraordinary tale into dance theatre is understandable. That Re-Triptych, a semi-biographical creation that’s one of the Edinburgh International Festival’s features in its Asian dance programme this year, is only intermittently intriguing to watch, and largely inchoate in choreography, seems also understandable. Some experiences are just too much to render in art.

The format is a travelogue made since 2006 in three parts, on Tibet, on Cambodia, the third, and most recent, on “the Silk Route”, linking Shen Wei’s Chinese roots with his New York life. All three are lit with almost clinical translucency by Jennifer Tipton, and costumed by Shen Wei in barely indicative clothing: sketchy trousers and tops, gym trunks and vests, or - for one section - nude-effect pants only. All three have scores melding traditional local chants and songs with music by Eastern-minded Westerners, such as John Tavener or David Lang.

In Re-(Part I) people in trim Fifth Avenue casualwear (ivory tees, dark crop pants) sit cross-legged silently sifting white confetti into a mandala pattern on the blue floor (pictured below © Alex Pines).

After bemusing the audience for a while with this, they rise to whirl and tumble in slow motion through the pattern, raising clouds of floating flecks while a large projection of a balmy blue sky lights up behind them and a throaty, frayed female voice chants Tibetan songs, sad, slow songs. The bodies seem gravityless, boneless, as performed by some of the better dancers - in the worse ones the challenge is too much to balance without wobbling, or to unfurl and wheel smoothly.

The overall effect is like watching a half-hour dance class. The imagery resonates very slightly, with, let’s say, ideas of people blown by fate, or falling through skies (9/11, I thought, with all those floating white flakes, and that blue sky). But quite soon the effort is just that, an effort. I remembered my willingness with Shen Wei’s Folding, shown in London a few years back, to be waylaid by super-slow, concentrated spiral falls in beautiful robes and strange headdresses (see video at the end).

On the other hand, the sparseness of clothes electrifies Re-(Part II) - or at least the latter part of it, which is a semi-naked episode of picturesque erotica where the dancers writhe slowly on the ground in (almost) the buff before a giant photograph of the great, phallic, dripping tree roots that embed themselves so lasciviously in the ruins of Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s temple (see picture below).

Tipton’s exactly targeted light pours over them, some darkly, some starkly, and in one move - where all lounge backwards on the ground ecstatically throwing their heads back behind one arm, so that they appear headless - you see a suddenly released abandonment and surrender quiver in synch through them all. Meanwhile the trembling violins of Tavener’s Tears of Angels trill higher and higher, and the jungle birdsong that Shen Wei recorded on his visit becomes earsplitting, while that monster tree root appears to throb and convulse as unseen hands ruffle the projection screen.

Orgasmic in design? Or chilling? There are said to be more bomb amputees in Cambodia than in any other country, and one of the projections in the earlier, pedestrian dance ensemble shows a satellite view of a wrecked city. It would be a lively, potentially rousing challenge to be saying in this scene: “Look at our incomplete bodies and judge, if you dare, our right to orgy under the moon, the chants of the monks and the eye of the gods.”

But when the stage result is so decoratively calculated, any anger so courteously expelled by the artfulness, to me it feels neutered, unprovocative, a look-don’t-touch display. So what did Shen Wei really feel when this image flashed into his eye? Arousal? Pity? Terror? A great stage photo-opportunity? Well, it's definitely that. (See main image.)

There’s a less self-conscious personality in the opening of Re-(Part III), a drill of commuters striding in sync forwards or backwards, like the to-and-fro of the working day in New York, all obedient in their pale street togs, except for the occasional maverick who breaks out. It’s observation dance, quite nifty, it wears a smile. In another part they’re dressed in boxer shorts and vests, hunkering down in a sporty drill. Still, Twyla Tharp has done both of these things better. There are some amusing pairs leaning against each other and testing their A-frame until it collapses - I wish I hadn’t seen Trisha Brown do that better.

Hm. Shen Wei is a stylist of dance, not a choreographer. I don’t doubt he has seen much, but it’s unsublimated, he doesn’t dare to say in dance what it feels like to be him. Despite the styling, the dancers are too unskilled, the choreography of too little physical variety and individuality, the reliance on slowness stupefying, the sterility of the emotional output final.

• Shen Wei Dance Arts perform Re-Triptych tonight and tomorrow at the Playhouse, Edinburgh. Shen Wei is "In Conversation" tomorrow at 5pm at the Hub
• Shen Wei Dance Arts website

Watch a trailer for Shen Wei’s Folding