RETURN ENGAGEMENT Wei Dance Arts weekend performances are a follow-up to an electrifying 2004 Kimmel Center debut.

The DanceBoom! Festival is on hiatus this year, but dance booms throughout Philly between now and June nevertheless. At least 40 dance events emblazon our stages, from classical ballet to modern dance with roots in European, Asian, Indian and Middle Eastern traditions. It all begins tonight with Shen Wei Dance Arts, which returns to the Kimmel Center after a jaw-dropping debut there in the 2004 Live Arts Festival.

Shen Wei (he always uses both names) was born in 1968 in China's Hunan province. Trained in Chinese opera traditions, he eventually went on to perform in one of China's first modern dance troupes, Guangdong Modern Dance Company. He moved to New York in 1994 and by 1999 was forming his own company.

Since 2000, his company has performed a dozen or more concerts in world capitals annually. (Now fully recovered from heart surgery in 1999, he performs regularly with his 13 fellow members, although he is not cast in the Philadelphia program.) In the coming months, he will travel back and forth to Beijing to choreograph the opening ceremonies for the Olympics in August. This follows a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius" award last year, and a half-dozen other awards, including the coveted Nijinsky medal.

He is so busy that he admits he has not yet taken time to fill in the tax forms to collect his MacArthur Foundation award.

Shen Wei's dances can be eerie, as in Near the Terrace, or futuristic, as in Folding, both from 2000. In 2005, he revisited his early Chinese opera roots in Second Visit to the Empress without a trace of nostalgia.

Just back from performing in Barcelona, he spoke by phone from New York about how his choreographic concepts evolved.

In 1995, he said, "the Alwin Nikolais Company gave me a fellowship to study" in New York. He found the style of Murray Louis, director of the company since Nikolais' death, to be difficult, abstract. "I didn't understand it. But it opened my mind to things I did not see in China. In New York I began to see there was a different concept behind each artist's work." Seeing Merce Cunningham's company was another shock - "I did not know dancers could move so differently, with such clean lines."

The result of these influences is an uncanny splicing of Eastern disciplines such as butoh and Chinese opera's gliding steps with release techniques and other Western practices he's observed since his arrival here.