“Everything can be dance. It has to do with our awareness of the body: perception, breathing, attention to the smallest details. … There can be dance everywhere, even in the midst of conflicting opposites. People are not only happy and celebrating Dance can be seen in times of sadness or despair. Dance can be seen in all situations. Now we are in a special era, and what I mean by 'special' is because in such an era, dance should be The moment that can truly be born. It is the expression of dance without any pretense." (Pina Bausch, 2001)
"Once in Germany, I went to the mall to buy a skirt. When I tried it on in the fitting room, I discovered that the skirt made a sound when it was pulled up. I wanted to use this sound to create. Skirts and women, skirts and voices, women and voices."
In mid-February last year, the Glass Menagerie (La Ménagerie de Verre), a famous experimental dance/theater art venue in Paris, ), Georges Balanchine Rehearsal Hall. Wen Hui and five young dancers from the Venus Dance Company are here to re-arrange her 1995 "Skirt" for the five-year exhibition collaboration between the West Bund Art Museum and Center Pompidou - "Her Shadow in the West Bund" contemporary dance Prepare for the performance in Shanghai in April. In several clips of rehearsals, I was shocked every time by the sound of dancers holding up their skirts. Pink sleeveless shift dress, outerwear/imprisonment, in which the body collides and expresses itself. During a break in rehearsal, Wen Hui talked about the origin of this creation in a German fitting room.
Four dancers in "New Birth Report", from top to bottom: Distakul, Coty, Sergucci, Wenhui
At the end of November, Paris Autumn Festival [1], the Paris City Theater is located The theater in Montmartre (théâtre de la ville - abbesse). Wen Hui's new work "New Birth Report" is performed here: it is about the dancers' choices about marriage and childbirth, and the subsequent life and physical experiences. The four dancers come from different countries (China, Italy, Iran, Thailand), different cultures, different social backgrounds, different age groups, speak different languages, and have different physical experiences. What communicates with each other are the whispers of the female body: breathing, speaking (monologues and dialogues in mother tongue or dialect), dancing, and singing. Various emotions such as tension, anxiety, joy, struggle, stretch, hesitation, fear, freedom and ease are interspersed between sound and music, reflecting the dancers' expressions and thoughts on their choices of body autonomy.
In 1995, when "The Skirt" was created, the World Conference on Women came to China for the first time. Parallel to this, the week-long World NGO Women's Forum was also held in Huairou, Beijing. More than two decades later, issues about women’s rights and security are still emerging around the world: In 2016, a United Nations survey report showed that in situations of war or violent conflict, women and girls are more vulnerable to gender discrimination and inequality. Vulnerable to sexual violence, sexual exploitation and trafficking. In countries affected by war or violent conflicts, 20% of female refugees or women who remain homeless in the country have been victims of sexual violence; starting in October 2017, with the spread of social media, in Discussions on women's physical infringement and other rights issues are gradually reverberating around the world; in June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It is believed that the U.S. federal constitution no longer grants women the right to have an abortion; in September 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was detained on charges of violating Iran’s dress regulations for women for “not wearing a headscarf correctly.” And died in custody; according to statistics from the United Nations Children's Fund in June 2023, 12 million underage girls enter child marriage every year around the world...
"New Birth Report" performance scene
In today's context, how Express the appeal of the female body in creation?
In 1995, Wen Hui was 35 years old. She was born in Yunnan and grew up in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, she went to Beijing Dance Academy to study choreography.The mid-1980s was the beginning of an extremely active period of experimental expression in the history of Chinese contemporary art. Young people from all over the world came to Beijing to pursue art for freedom. By exploring painting, sculpture, installation, video, theater, dance, performance art, etc. The possibility of media expresses the relationship between oneself and the society that is undergoing great changes. During a trip to New York in 1994, Wen Hui studied in the studios of many American modern dance masters (José Limón, Eric Hawkins, Trisha Brown ]), changed her understanding of dance language and enriched her vocabulary of dance creation. The concept of the work "100 Verbs" was initially formed in New York. Wen Hui's solo dance showed a woman's day's work, thus thinking about the daily living conditions of most women at that time under the social division of labor. Returning to Beijing, Wenhui and her friends co-founded one of the earliest independent dance studios in China - Life Dance Studio. She invited 10 of her close friends, all of whom were non-professional dancers, to use their natural "non-dancer" bodies to perform "100 Verbs" (1994) with her, and it was performed in the classroom of Beijing Dance Academy. Wen Hui said that when she was in her thirties, her female consciousness had just begun to emerge, and she gradually became interested in female topics and living conditions. From 1995 to 1999, she interviewed dozens of Chinese women with different professions intermittently and recorded their oral accounts of their growth and physiological changes on audio tapes. Among them, women's vivid narrations of their own childbirth experiences have become the introduction to new works.
The 1999 "Birth Report" was born from this, and premiered at the Beijing People's Art Theater in November of that year. It is not a performance stage that is simply watched, but a living space open to the audience: tables, beds of different sizes, bed sheets. The four women ate melon seeds together, chatted about household chores, and carried out their daily washing and drying; the oral interview video of each dancer's mother was played in the space. Two men on the stage: one slept soundly throughout the performance, and the other, Wu Wenguang, entered the performance space midway with a digital camera in hand. His camera closes in on every female dancer on the stage, taking them one by one into a cramped space outside the stage, allowing them to talk about the topic of fertility. The filmed content is simultaneously played on the screen in the theater. When each interview lasted seven minutes, the stage manager signaled to stop, Wu Wenguang's filming was immediately interrupted, and the dancers returned to the stage to continue their performance. Between the tension between reality and fiction, off-site and on-site, the work often presents a confrontation between the imposition of power and the release of elimination.
In 2003, "Birth Report" was invited to perform at the Paris Autumn Art Festival. This was also the first time that Wen Hui came to Paris to participate in the art festival with her personal creations. The stage has an open form, and the audience can move around at will and choose the place and length of viewing among the performers, interview videos, personal narrations and performance spaces. While the French art criticism media were deeply impressed by Wen Hui's directorial style, they also had a "face-to-face" contact with the self-statements of women in Chinese society after the reform and opening up in the oral narration video of the work.
"New Birth Report" performance scene
In 2023, the four performers in "New Birth Report" also carried baggage made of sheets. This prop was also used by Wen Hui as a "human body device" in the 1999 "Birth Report". In the new creation, it has more metaphorical meanings and carries more possibilities: it can be a pregnant belly (as a body extension), it can be the burden of trivial housework, the heavy pressure of patriarchal society and family values on women’s role expectations, or it can be the plane on which images/memories/dreams are projected. Images and sounds are embedded in the body, where the body experiences, attempts to break free and grow.
Live audio and video dialogue between Wen Hui and her mother on "Body"
Alessendra Corti, 45 years old, an Italian dancer, is pregnant, carefully protects her pregnancy, and insists on dancing. She is now a mother of two children. Faced with fatigue and doubts from the outside world, she insists on balancing the care of her children with the work she loves; Wen Hui, 63, is a Chinese contemporary dance choreographer, currently creating in Frankfurt.Unmarried, without children, going through menopause, and having doubts about the body due to this period of physical and life experiences, and moving forward more freely; Patcharaporn Krüger-distakul, 33 years old, born in Thailand, Germany An American dancer and yoga teacher talks about her psychological and physical memories of the night she was rushed to the hospital to give birth; Parvin Saljoughi, 34, an Iranian choreographer and performing artist, currently studying in Brussels and creation. In the memory of the dream, she was pregnant with an eagle's child, and communicated with her father through it. The dream projected her desire for freedom of body choice, but her father on the other end of the phone seemed to always have a communication gap with her due to lack of signal.
The quilts in "Bundle" spread out and became a plane on which women's memories are projected, on which the dancers' respective mothers are reflected from young to old. The picture shows a portrait of Distakul's mother when she was young. After the performance,
chatted with Sergage about this allegorical dream and her singing on stage twice. She said that both of them are traditional Iranian folk songs: "Women's loneliness, sorrow, and sadness of losing loved ones. Sometimes history seems to be condensed in these feelings of women." There is no subtitle explanation, "because the sound has its own penetrating power. .”
The dancers’ “baggage” reflects the voice of global women’s protests
Every performer may not represent a certain group, but it can be an aspect of it. When they placed their "baggage" on the floor of the stage, the "baggage" was like the four continents of the earth, onto which were projected the images and voices of women from all over the world who have collectively protested because their rights or bodies were violated in recent years. The performers’ private narratives find different contrasts and echoes in the collective voices of women around the world at this moment.
Because non-professional dancers, videos, personal narratives and other forms are often used in her works, Wen Hui's creations are often classified as "documentary theater" or "dance theatre". The term "tanztheater" (tanztheater[2]) was proposed in the 1920s by Rudolf van Laban (1879-1958), an Austrian-Hungarian choreographer, theorist, and expressionist dance pioneer. The concept came to the new generation of choreographers in Germany after World War II in the 1960s—especially three of them women: Pina Bausch (1940-2009), Reinhild Hofmann (Reinhild Hoffmann) and Susanne Linke - while inheriting the expressionist art tradition of "dance theater", they will create a deeper observation of reality. Wen Hui never concealed her love for Pina Bausch. When she was still studying at the Beijing Dance Academy, she saw the video of Pina's early work "Café Müller" (1978) for the first time, and she was deeply moved. In addition to being influenced by the abstract language of American modern dance while studying in New York in the 1990s, Wen Hui found in Pina the resonance of another texture that the subject can truly express. In 1995, she went to Essen, Germany alone to study at the dance department of Pina Bausch's alma mater Folkwang University of the Arts (folkwang universität, the cradle of German modern dance masters). On the recommendation of a friend, Wenhui went to the Wuppertal Dance Theater (tanztheater wuppertal) to watch the rehearsal of "Carnation", one of the representative works of the Pina Dance Company (nelken, 1982), and wrote a short essay "Pie" in the form of notes. The Works of Na Bausch and Her Smile". In this article, one of the first in China to introduce this important choreographer of the 20th century as a fellow dancer, Wen Hui wrote: “What I saw in the rehearsal venue was not just a bunch of body movements, but a A real-life person with breathing and body temperature. From that atmosphere, I can sense that she is expanding the concept of dance movements from a human perspective."
If we put aside the formal label of combining pure dance with drama, Wen Hui Perhaps the closest thing to Pina’s “Dance Theater” is their shared desire for honesty and authenticity in dance creation: honesty in observation of human nature and society, and true expression of individual bodies and hearts. Use this as a basis to find the corresponding choreographic form in creation.As Pina explained this insistence on "authenticity" in a conversation with German dance critic Norbert Servos: "Because only through such expressions can we communicate most directly, which is a body Communication with the body."
In 2021, "I'm 60", Wen Hui's autobiography, is a gift to herself when she enters her sixties. France is still in the midst of the epidemic at the beginning of 2021. With more than a year of data collection and creative clues accumulation, as well as the cooperation with female poet and film scholar Zhang Zhen in text and image writing, Wen Hui opened a new exhibition in the Cité Internationale in Paris. des arts) completed this residency and performed it at the Paris Autumn Arts Festival in the same year. The stage is layered with images: tracing the origins of Chinese women's liberation from China's silent films of the 1930s, from Wen Hui's personal story to the modern era of Chinese women. Fictional or recorded images, during which Wen Hui dances solo, the montage of bodies and images discusses the awakening of Chinese women's consciousness from the 1930s to today. Before we could even talk about the richer and more detailed exploration of the female body and female issues in her creations over the years, as well as her feelings about this while working and communicating with the new generation of dancers, Wen Hui flew to New York to start. New work plan. The documentary "no rule is our rule, 2022", which she co-produced with the New York-based Japanese interdisciplinary artist Eiko Otake, will be screened at the Asia Society Theater in New York. The magical encounter and relationship between the two Asian female artists can only be continued until the next time they meet.
Note:
[1] Paris Autumn Arts Festival (festival d'automne à paris): The Paris Autumn Arts Festival, founded in 1972, integrates different artistic expressions such as drama, dance, visual arts, plastic arts, music, and movies. Form, artists from all over the world are invited to present their works here. In addition to internationally renowned artists, the festival is also a platform for emerging authors to showcase their creations. This autumn art festival has more than 80 performances, as well as special exhibitions or retrospective screenings of different artists' works. The art festival will kick off on January 30, 2024.
[2] When Laban proposed the concept of "dance theater", he was looking for a work that integrated various performing arts forms on the stage and emphasized the directness of physical and emotional expression. When he opened several schools in Germany and began teaching in 1918, "Dancing Theater" gradually changed in the inheritance of his German apprentices. Among them, Kurt Joss (1901-1979, also Pina Bausch's teacher), assisted by Mary Wigman (1886-1973), an important female choreographer in Expressionist dance. The dance department established at the Folkwang Academy of Arts in Essen played an important role in the evolution and development of the form of "dance theater" in the history of contemporary dance in Germany.
