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Prior to becoming a choreographer, Shen studied Chinese opera for 15 years, eventually performing with the Hunan State Xian Opera. When he arrived in New York on a Modern-dance scholarship more than a decade ago, he said the work of Abstract Expressionist painters consumed him. Shen identified Vaslav Nijinksy and Igor Stravinsky, who successfully cast off classical traditions in search of their voice, as his personal heroes.

In Rite of Spring, from 2003 and Folding from 2000, the influence of Shen’s three-pronged education is seen. And like Shen’s voice—serene, poetic and confident—his dances resound with elegance. Whether his choreography is coolly punctuated or erotically slow, his works resemble each other for looking neither Western nor Eastern, following neither ballet, modern dancer or the Chinese opera tradition. They resemble each other for their exactitude. No finger of his dozen-member cast is out of place. No eye moves out of synch with the other eyes, which gaze at us like exotic creatures inside an extraterrestrial game park.

In “Folding” from 2000, the dancers emerge and retreat with conical-shaped headdresses held high, resembling high priestesses on an important errand. The dancers fast-floating gait is swallowed by red skirts, whose trains swoosh menacingly like a sea dragon’s tail. In white face paint and skirts of blood red and dead-of-night black, the dancers resemble half-fish half-humans who have never seen the sunlight.
 

Shen structures his dance experimentally: He investigates how many ways the body can fold. As for the dancers necks, their upper vertebrae fold back so far their headdresses point downward like honey combs. The effect pf every limb folding, the Android-meets-Schiaparelli costumes and the religious music, which combines Tibetan Buddhist chants and the mystically-inclined English composer John Tavener, creates a never-been-here before feeling. I call it global mystic futurism.

In “Rite of Spring” from 2003, Shen, like numerous other ambitious choreographers, pays homage to Stravinsky’s revolutionary 1913 score. But in Shen’s rite, he doesn’t choreograph a sacrificial virgin’s dance unto her death. There is nothing Spring like in his set, whose palette is gray. At the climax of recording, a piano distillation of the original orchestrated score, the ashen-faced dancers close their eyes, transforming the violence of the sound into monk-like meditation. Shen answers the score’s violence and chaos with serenity. This could be the choreographer’s mantra: to subvert historic and every day violence into a lush other worldliness. Dancer James Healey bursts sideways into the air, but then returns to stillness. Joan Wadopian limbs cascade into chaotic abundance, but only momentarily. In Rite, Shen takes bodily precision to lofty heights. This is mesmerizing. The fact that it’s not unique is beside the point.

Shen’s next work, Second Visit to the Empress, makes its New York premiere on July 24.