Winter 1999. In the small theater belonging to the Beijing People's Art Theater, there was a tense atmosphere. It was just before the premiere of "Report on Giving Birth" by choreographer and dancer Wen Hui, a production of her independent Living Dance Studio, which was presenting work in the heart of the capital for the first time. Admission was free, the theater was full, there were no seats, and the audience could move freely. The performance area was covered with colorful bedsheets. A large white padded quilt hung in the space. A woman in everyday clothes was already sitting at the dining table, talking to herself, while a man under the quilt "on stage" slept as if he were at home. The first image we encountered was so familiar, as if it had been taken from our daily life. Everyone was extremely curious because everything looked different from what we were used to in the theater.
Even after more than 20 years, I can still remember that evening, the impressive images, and the emotions evoked by the movements and narratives, mostly spoken in dialect. The hanging quilt, sewn together from small blankets, provided a documentary layer intertwined with the performance. The mothers of the performers were projected onto it, sharing their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, material that had emerged from Wen Hui's numerous conversations with them. Filmmaker Wu Wenguang interviewed the present dancers during the performance with a video camera, projecting their faces live onto the quilt. The use of everyday materials - a typical feature of Wen Hui's work - was extraordinary at the time. The padded quilts and used bed sheets, collected by Wen Hui from residents as she went from house to house, seemed like silent witnesses. They were folded and unfolded, carried as luggage or a child on the bodies of the women, or became a part of their bodies. All of this familiarity, however, transcended the ordinary by far, evoking personal memories and poetic imagery in the spectators.
Scene from "I am 60"
Living Dance Studio
Wen Hui is a pioneer in documentary (dance) theater in China. In addition to her work for the stage, she directs documentaries, conceives installations, and curates artistic projects. She was born in 1960 in the city of Kunming in the southwestern province of Yunnan. At the age of 13, she began classical dance training. Due to her small and petite stature, she was never allowed to perform as a solo dancer and always stood on the outermost edge during group dances. These were formative experiences in a rigid system. In the 1980s, Wen Hui studied choreography, a newly established discipline at the Beijing Dance Academy. After graduating in 1989, she was assigned a position as a choreographer at the state-owned Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble. In 1994, Wen Hui spent six months in New York, which expanded her horizons regarding dance and art and provided a crucial impetus for her artistic development. Back in Beijing, she co-founded the Living Dance Studio with her artistic partner, documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang, to bring dance to the ground of reality and connect art with society. Their aim was to "show life as life itself" and thereby distance themselves from both state ideology and commercial manipulation. In 1995, Wen Hui had the opportunity to observe a rehearsal of Pina Bausch's dance group in Wuppertal. The creative atmosphere she created there and the free individual expression of the dancers deeply impressed her. The choreographer bid farewell to learned dogmas such as expressiveness and virtuosity and developed a special sense for stories, body language, and materials from the real world. The studio's first performance, "100 Verbs," was based on everyday verbs involving about ten participants from different professions and marked a turning point in Wen Hui's creative process. Since then, she has worked equally with amateurs, professional performers, and artists from all disciplines in her productions. Her later trilogy, "Report on Giving Birth," "Report on the Body" (2002), and "Report on 37.8°C" (2005), connected documentary material with artistic means and shaped the style of the Living Dance Studio. Since these three reports, Wen Hui's works have been invited to many international festivals.
In 2005, the studio moved to the Chao Chang Di Workstation in northeastern Beijing, opened its own theater, and formed an almost familial community. In this periphery, independent of the state system, numerous workshops, performances, and encounters took place. In 2008, the Living Dance Studio embarked on a new direction with the eight-hour performance "Memory." Private memories, photos, and documentary footage from Wen Hui, Wu Wenguang, and writer Feng Dehua (the narrator at the dining table in "Report on Giving Birth") from the Cultural Revolution period of 1966 to 1976 served as the starting point for this very personal and physical stage documentation. Subsequently, the studio launched the long-term project "People's Memory Project" (Minjian jiyi jihua) in 2009. It aimed to have a deeper impact on the society and history of the country. The project invited people from various social strata to return to their places of origin with a video camera and research specific periods of recent Chinese history that had never been processed. Wen Hui began making her own documentary films at that time. This People's Memory Project gave rise to a series of documentaries and stage works: "Memory II: Hunger" (2010), "Memory on the Road" (2011), "Listening to Third Grandmother's Stories" (2012), "Memory III: Tombstone" (2012). In 2014, there was a significant disruption in Wen Hui's life. Due to rapidly rising property prices in the real estate market, the Living Dance Studio had to leave the Chao Chang Di Workstation. Wen Hui lost her theater. Since then, the artist leads a nomadic life, and the Living Dance Studio goes with her wherever she is creatively engaged. Artistic interventions in historical consciousness.
Back to the evening of "Report on Giving Birth." I remember that after the premiere, many friends and audience members stayed in the theater for a long time, engaged in excited discussions until the night porter had to close the gate. It was a time of artistic awakening in Beijing. This momentum was later halted and stifled after a decade, and the small theater has already been demolished as part of urban redevelopment.
I find "Report on Giving Birth" to be exemplary of Wen Hui's interest in individual destinies, her search for personal memories, and her focus on the concrete experiences of women. It is the people with their individual stories who reflect the history of the country, a history that is officially taboo and destined to be forgotten in the collective consciousness. A typical example is the production "Memory II: Hunger," which Wen Hui worked on with young people, most of whom were born in the 1980s. It dealt with the so-called "Three Years of Natural Disasters," in reality, the famine that occurred between 1959 and 1961 as a result of the Land Reform during the enforced "Great Leap Forward." Wen Hui sent these young people back to their hometowns to interview their grandparents and other elderly individuals who had experienced this period. In the performance, these young people played on stage and presented their interviews as important historical documents.
"Report on Giving Birth" is also exemplary of Wen Hui's tireless exploration of the body and her quest to expand the boundaries of dance. She believes that every life story has left its marks on the body. On the occasion of her work on "100 Verbs," the choreographer expressed, "I don't think about how to dance, but that you are doing it. I like working with people. Their bodies are real. We don't emphasize body technique. Your life experience is your technique. I am convinced that wherever life leads, that is where our dance is." With this awareness, Wen Hui brings together people from diverse backgrounds. Whether it's the migrant workers in "Dance with Migrant Workers" (2001), her Third Grandmother and her mother in "Listening to Third Grandmother's Stories," the writer in "Memory," or the Czech engineer in "Ordinary People," to name just a few examples. Wen Hui examines the body as if with a scalpel, layer by layer, making the individual and the unique visible. For the eight-hour version of "Memory," the choreographer went even further: she turned her attention to her own body and explored the connection between body language and social conditioning. During the rehearsal process, she consciously avoided a complex artistic form and chose only a single line and sequence of movements for herself: moving forward, moving backward, breathing, walking. An ingrained body posture that reminded her of her coming of age as a woman. In the performance, Wen Hui stood on stage for eight hours, repeating this sequence like in Zen. She says, "The human body can truly transcend itself. With your body, you go further than with your mind."
Women's destinies
In 2011, Wen Hui found herself in a deep crisis in her life. She used the "Volksgedächtnis-Projekt" (People's Memory Project) as an opportunity to travel to her hometown in Yunnan province to visit an 84-year-old woman in a remote mountain village named Da He Bian (which translates to "Next to the Big River" in German). She was the third aunt of Wen Hui's father and was known as Third Grandmother. At that time, the artist wondered why her father had never mentioned this relative. After his death, when she decided to trace her own family history, she learned about Third Grandmother, the last surviving member of her generation. The artist felt a strong urge to meet this woman. In the solo performance "I am 60," she tells the story of this unique encounter: "Third Grandmother woke up at 7 o'clock and waited at the entrance of the village for me, as if she had been waiting for me at the end of a tunnel for 50 years, like her own granddaughter finally coming home. She told me her entire life." To her amazement, Wen Hui learned that Third Grandmother had given her actual granddaughter the same name that Wen Hui carried. She listened to Third Grandmother, lived, danced, and rehearsed with her. Third Grandmother's stories ranged from her childhood in an affluent family, an arranged marriage at a young age, and divorce before the liberation or the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, to the major land reform that followed and the confiscation of all family property, culminating in the traumatic suicide of her mother. Wen Hui learned family secrets that had never been heard before. What deeply moved her, however, was that despite all these unimaginable hardships, Third Grandmother had retained her humor and openness.
From 2011 to 2012, the artist visited that village three times and documented the most impressive moments with this woman. In the film "Dance with Third Grandmother" (2015), we see the two women from different generations approaching each other, intimately touching and embracing while dancing. The younger one says to the older one, "Nainai (Grandmother in dialect), when we are sad, we dance. When we dance, we are no longer sad."
In 2013, Wen Hui went to the village of Da He Bian for the fourth time and learned that Third Grandmother had already passed away forever. But for the "granddaughter who finally came home," she never left. Her spirit has continued to be a guiding light for the artist since their first meeting. It gives her strength not to give up and drives her to thoroughly reflect on the established structure and the miserable status of (Chinese) women in the patriarchal system. This encounter showcased Wen Hui's multifaceted talents. She created two documentaries about Third Grandmother and a stage work that told the story from the perspective of three generations of women.
Her exploration of women's destinies deepened in the 2015 performance "Red." In 2014, the revolutionary model ballet "The Red Detachment of Women" celebrated its 50th anniversary, one of eight model dramas created by Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, for state propaganda during the Cultural Revolution. Against this historical backdrop, Wen Hui instead sought out the former dancers of the model ballet and conducted interviews with eyewitnesses. Ultimately, she deconstructed the hierarchical stage appearances, the dramatic dance movements, the coded costumes, and props of this model ballet with three other performers. In the new production, she made visible the self-sacrificing role of women and the lie in the present.
Scene from "I am 60"
"I am 60," created in 2020, marked Wen Hui's 60th birthday. She took this milestone as an opportunity to look back and reflect on her life. This performance, her most recent and also her very first solo performance, premiered in Weimar at the art festival in 2021. For this performance, she drew inspiration from silent films that depicted the unjust fate of women and their determination to break free. These films had their golden age in Shanghai in the 1930s. Accompanied by an inner dialogue with Third Grandmother, the artist reflects on her childhood, her mother, whose perspective on life greatly influenced her, and her personal crisis as a woman and artist. Parallel to the autobiographical elements and in connection with the performer's body, we see historical photos and current statistics about the (precarious) condition of Chinese women in a male-dominated system. The theme of women's social status in Chinese society has gained particular relevance recently, following the circulation of shocking photos and video footage in early February 2022 of a chained woman living in a village in Jiangsu province who had given birth to eight children. This woman had been kidnapped, raped, and brutally mistreated as a human breeding machine. This incident exposed one of the darkest sides of society.
In "I am 60," Wen Hui effectively utilizes the "linked drama" presentation method, which originated during Shanghai's silent film era and which she has also used in other stage works: Cinematic images serve as a panorama and interact with live performance. The projection serves as a threshold from the fictional to the real world, from the past to the present, and vice versa. The interplay of live performance, video, and audio creates an interconnected Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). It is Wen Hui's most personal performance to date, moving through the epochs of Chinese (women's) history. A wonderful gift to herself for her birthday and for us, the audience.
In the film "Dance with Third Grandmother," there is a poignant dialogue between Wen Hui and Third Grandmother while they are dancing:
W: Nainai, do you see me?
T: I see you.
W: I see you too. Nainai, where are you?
T: I am here. Wen Hui, do you see me?
W: My heart sees you.
T: I see you too.
Third Grandmother is a radiant presence throughout this solo performance. Wen Hui passes on the light. She believes that every life finds a moment to fully unfold. I believe that Wen Hui's life is flourishing even more at the age of 60.
(Published in the Ruhrtriennale 2022 program)