Modern dance only took root in China on the cusp of the 21st century, after much American intervention. By then, modern dance had become postmodern, shedding its founding creed of idiosyncratic individualism for cultural borrowings and collaboration. So Shen Wei—a founding member of Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the first of its kind in China—fits right in. For this joint commission by the Guangdong troupe and the American Dance Festival, which ushered the Chinese company into being 35 years ago, Shen presents choreography as calligraphy. The dancers sprawl on the floor and ribbon their limbs to spread the globs of paint beneath them. They have done this before for Shen, but the colors weren’t so bright nor did the dancers move with such willful abandon, like the scrawls of the most headstrong and drunk of Chinese scroll-poets. Mindscape will have its Stateside premiere where Shen first studied modern dance, at the American Dance Festival. In New York, the dance is part of Lincoln Center’s free, outdoors, and enticing Chinese Arts Week. —Apollinaire Scherr