EMBATTLED GARDEN Fang-Yi Sheu gets tangled up in blue.

Photograph: Lois Greenfield

Unlike most of the New York dance elite, Eliot Feld was never part of the Fang-Yi Sheu fan club—he simply never witnessed her raw radiance with the Martha Graham Dance Company. Next week, she will nevertheless bring one of his long-conceived choreographic visions to life. In Isis in Transit, included in Feld’s upcoming season at the Joyce Theater, Sheu, 36, will climb several mountain peaks, wrestle with treacherous reeds, rattle a six-foot-diameter aluminum disc, recline in a Plexiglas coffin and finally, strap on a pair of wings and fly away.

Choreographers and dancers often refer to the solo experience as a journey, but this 15-minute work set to Steve Reich’s Violin Phase comes close to the real thing. “This dance was begun in 1995, and the idea somehow emanated from the myth of Isis and Osiris,” says Feld in his Ballet Tech office. “His brother [Seth] cut Osiris up into many pieces and strew them all over, and Isis went on a search for the pieces to reassemble him. She needed to put him back together so that he could have an afterlife. She found everything but his cock, so she made him one. That’s love.”

In Sheu, Feld has finally found a dancer capable of navigating the “unfriendly terrain,” as he puts it, designed by Mimi Lien (who created the stunning ramp for Feld’s Sir Isaac’s Apples for the Juilliard School in 2005). In Lien, Feld observes “a sensibility without mannerism. I actually think that my thinking has somewhat changed or my imagination is freer to contrive because I have a soul mate when it comes to putting things on the stage.”

Sheu, who splits her time between New York and Taiwan, has stopped dancing with the Graham company (though she’s considering a guest-artist appearance in the future) and with Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, to pursue solo projects; she also formed her own company, which recently presented an informal showing at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. “With the Graham company, 2006 was a transition for myself in dance or in my life—I’m not sure which,” she says. “I was not really satisfied. I wanted more. But more of what? That’s my homework. So I cut out the famous companies; without Graham and Cloud Gate, what do I have left as a dancer? I especially want to know if there is any potential in my body that I haven’t discovered yet. If there are only two or three years left, I want to keep them for myself.”

Working with Feld provides one such opportunity for exploration, and Sheu has relished the process. “This whole stage is art, I have to say,” she notes, gesturing to Lien’s set pieces in one of Feld’s studios. The enclosure of blue reeds, for instance, is hauntingly beautiful; they are so strong that during the dance, Sheu stands among them as if she is floating. As it turns out, they also smack. “I have to show you a picture,” she says, proudly displaying visual evidence of her bruised arms. “The other day, I went to a ballet class, and Alessandra Ferri said, ‘Did someone beat you up?’ ” Sheu recalls. “I said, ‘Yes! A set.’ ” Still, thanks to her experiences with Graham’s choreography, the dancer is used to feisty decor elements. “I feel like they are all my partners,” she explains. “I have to get along with them, and I have to know their tempo and their emotions. Especially the reeds! They have their way of moving, and when you count, they’re counting with you.”

The process of working with Feld has been a bit challenging too, but not for obvious reasons. “A lot of people asked me: ‘How do you like working with him?’ ” Sheu says. “So I asked him: ‘Do you have a very bad reputation?’ ” She laughs. “We get along very well. We can talk to each other, and we can joke. Maybe it’s different with other dancers, but when he starts to get upset, it’s for the work. As long as you understand that, you don’t take it personally.”

For Sheu, the adjustment has simply been working with a living choreographer. “In the Graham work, every movement seems very precise, but without Graham watching me there is still probably a little bit of room for me to move back and forth,” she says. “But here, Eliot really knows what he wants. He said, ‘The closer you get to the season, the more I’ll back off; when you’re on the stage, I completely disappear and it’s yours.’ I respect that a lot. He takes care of the dancer, and because of the way he treated me, that’s the way I want to treat dancers in the future.”

Mandance Project is at the Joyce Theater Wed 9–Apr 20, 2008.