The body is an archive, both witness to and carrier of history. It is a location where we understand how the assembled histories and memories it contains have inscribed themselves. Our bodies are also catalysts for memory and the sites of transgressive impulses. We use embodied knowledges and practices to reenact the past, to transmit experiences from one generation to another, and to tease out the biopolitical logic of specific historical events.
RED (2015), choreographed by WEN Hui, is one of the latest works from the Beijing-based Living Dance Studio. As a documentary performance, its point of departure is derived from a nationally renowned ballet, The Red Detachment of Women. The premiere of this ballet in Beijing on September 26, 1964, marked its launch as one of the eight revolutionary model theatrical works that formed the official cultural canon of the Cultural Revolution.
The performance, which recounted the story of WU Qionghua, a peasant girl who fled enslavement to join the Red Army-led women’s detachment in Hainan Province and battle against Nationalist troops, was immediately hailed as an impeccable integration of revolutionary ideology and artistic mastery, a unique blend of Western ballet techniques with the fundamentals of Chinese classical and folk dances.
As it returns artistic and critical attention to heroic, gun-wielding youthful dancers balancing on their toes, RED also uses a variety of documentary materials—publications, audio-visual clips, memorabilia from the original revolutionary model ballet, and interview footage—to not only evoke a special territory of memory but also to reactivate a living and lived archive within specific bodies: those of the performers, and those of people who experienced the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).
Onscreen, RED explores memories and understandings shared by performers and interviewees about this tumultuous decade. Onstage, from distinct perspectives, two generations of performers anatomize the original choreography.
RED evokes the model ballet as a product of its era—as an ideologically charged cultural and collective practice, an over-consumed and over-disengaged artifact in the post-socialist period. It also revives the model ballet as a form of feminist intervention that continues to inspire women to challenge their gender and socioeconomic oppression in today’s China.
RED premiered at the Shanghai Power Station of Art (ReActor Series) in December 2015. Since then it has been invited to the GetLost Festival (previously Ervaar Daar Hier Theater) in the Netherlands (2016), the BOK Festival in Macau (2016), the Goethe-Institut Beijing (2016), the Hong Kong i-DANCE Festival (2016), Zürcher Theater Spektakel (2017), KulturstadtWeimar (2017), Festival d'Automne à Paris (2017), and Charleroi Danse in Belgium (2017). Now, in 2018, Living Dance Studio has brought the piece to London, Glasgow, Prague, Rome, and New York. In 2019, RED will continue to travel to more places across the globe.
It is our sincere hope to not only continue presenting RED to the world, but also to bring it back home—where public sharing of memories about the Cultural Revolution, either collective or personal, is still strongly influenced by the often-complicated political atmosphere of the PRC.
As scholar Richard Terdiman famously observed, “Memory is the present past.” We agree that the past continuously invades and invests the present through memory, and add that memory is both stored in the body and transmitted through it. With RED, we aim to publicly present contested memories of a unique cultural product, to enable all of us, performers and audiences, to ponder how and why multidimensional attitudes have developed around this complex historical epoch.
The Living Dance Studio
The Beijing-based Living Dance Studio is an independent, non-profit contemporary dance theatre group that was founded in 1994 by dancer/choreographer WEN Hui and documentary filmmaker WU Wenguang. Since its inception, the group has become a pioneer in contemporary Chinese art and been playing an exploratory role in the scenes of global contemporary performance. To re/present narratives and experiences from both the present and the past of the society of China, the Living Dance Studio advocates collaborating with artists from a variety of media and disciplines in an open manner, and is committed to integrating dance, theatre, and interdisciplinary forms of expression.
The works of the Living Dance Studio have particularly engaged with archival research, body memories, and alternative historical narratives. By 2008, the Living Dance Studio had already staged an eight-hour multimedia performance, Remembering I, which probed everyday life and ritual, material culture, and historical events during the Cultural Revolution through memories of a group of intellectuals born in the 1950s and 1960s. In an effort to continue the practice of social remembering and alternative historical reconstruction, the Living Dance Studio and the Caochangdi Workstation launched the Minjian (Folk) Memory Project in 2010, a project dedicated to engaging peasant survivors of the Great Leap Forward (1959-1961) in forms of remembrance. Since then, the Living Dance Studio has created more performances and documentaries in association with the Minjian Memory Project.
The Living Dance Studio has also played an important role in the promotion and development of public space. Since 2004, it has curated and organized a series of public events and creative activities at both the Caochangdi Workstation and other art venues, including the annual “Crossing” International Dance Festival, Young Choreographers’ Project, the European Artists Exchange Program, etc.
The Living Dance Studio has presented their works at a number of national and international festivals, including Shanghai Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Festival a’Automne De Paris, Défilés de la Biennale de la Danse de Lyon, Festival, Avignon, France , Dance Umbrella London, Julidans, Wiener Festwochen, Vienna International Dance Festival, Theater der Welt by ITI in Essen, Germany,Romaeuropa Festival Rome, Akcent - International Festival of Documentary Theatre, Prague, Charleroi Danse in Belgium, Malta Festival, Pozna, Poland,Gothenburg Dance and Theater Festival, Gothenburg, Sweden,Festival/Tokyo, Singapore Arts Festival, I-Dance Festival Hong Kong, China, Bok Festival, Macau, China, etc.
In 2004, their piece, Report on Body, was awarded the ZKB Patronage Prize by Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
About the creative team
Wen Hui（choreographer / Video interviewer/ Performer）
A choreographer, dancer, Wen Hui also makes documentary films and installations. She is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary dance theatre. She graduated from Beijing Dance Academy in 1989 with a degree in Choreography. In 1994, she studied modern dance in New York. From 1997 to 1998, she received a scholarship from Asian Cultural Council to further her study of modern dance and theatre making in New York. From 1999 to 2000, Wen Hui joined the famous American contemporary choreographer Ralph Lemon’s dance company, and performed the "Geography Trilogy: Tree" at Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival in New York and around the United States.
In 1994, she founded Living Dance Studio with friends in Beijing. In 2005, Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang established Caochangdi Workstation and co-curated the “Crossing” International Dance Festival in Beijing. In the same year, they initiated European Artists Exchange Project and Young Choreographers Project. In 2015, Wen Hui organized and participated in the “ReActor” project at Power Station of Art in Shanghai.
In 2015, she participated in the Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
In 2019, her work was Participate in the exhibition：Yvonne Rainer and Wen hui at INSIDE – OUT ATR MUSEUM.
For twenty-five years, Wen Hui has been using dance theatre as a means of social intervention. Since 2008, she began to research on the body as a form of personal social documentation and to experiment how bodily memory catalyzes collision between history and reality. Wen Hui’s work has received international attention. She and the Living Dance Studio have been invited to the most probing stages and festivals internationally. In 2009, French magazine Télescope describes Wen Hui as “a pioneer of dance…a miracle.”
Jiayun Zhuang （Text / Dramaturg）
Jiayun Zhuang is a playwriting graduate of the Central Academy of Theatre. She received her Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies from UCLA and held an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. She taught in the Department of Dramatic Art at UNC-Chapel Hill, and has been appointed as an invited professor at the Beijing Dance Academy.
Jiayun has been experimenting with storytelling paradigms and technical possibilities in theater and performance. She serves as concept developer and writer at CAMLab at Harvard University, and as dramaturg for the PlayMakers Repertory Company. In 2017, Jiayun and Shanghai-based choreographer Fan Jiang founded The Three Bowls Co-op—a performance group that experiments with interdisciplinary and non-hierarchical integration of theatre, dance, live music, improv, visual arts, and daily-life movements. Jiayun also collaborates with the Beijing-based New Youth Theatre and the Living Dance Studio. Her upcoming project, at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund (Germany), is a performance installation on the information dissemination and public engagement in the post-truth era.
Kai TUCHMANN (Dramaturge)
Dramaturg in the Creative Process, Tuchmann is a theatre maker whose works mainly deal with the interdependence of historiography and politics. His creations were invited to numerous festivals, e.g. Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, and Seoul Marginal Theatre Festival.
Tuchmann is a member of the Theatre Faculties at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, and of the University of Music and Performing Arts Frankfurt.
Zou Xueping （Video）
Zou Xueping, graduated from China Academy of Art, is a documentary filmmaker and theater producer based in Shanghai. She has completed one theater work and six Zoujia village series documentaries since her participation in the Folk Memory Project by Beijing Caochangdi Workstation in 2010, as she interviewed the elders about the history and memories of Zoujia village where she was born and raised.
In 2016, she worked as an actress and cinematographer in the co-operated German documentary drama About My Parents and Their Children directed by German director Matthias Jochmann.
Since 2010, she participated in multiple theater productions with Wen Hui’s Living Dance Studio including Memory, Memory Hunger and Red, performed in many cities in China, France, Germany, Netherlands, America etc..
Her documentary Starving Village was selected by film festivals such as Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival and Tampere Film Festival for screening and discussion.
Satiated Village, the Beijing Independent Film Festival prize winner, was selected as the opening film for Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series exhibited in MoMA, New York, and has been screened in many universities including NYU and Harvard.
Foolish Village won the Jury Award in South Taiwan Film Festival.
Her theater work Time Line 2019，was performed in Power Station of Art in Shanghai.
Edwin van Steenbergen （Light Designer ）
Edwin is based in the Netherlands. When studying history at the University of Amsterdam, he started his first job in theatre as a technician. Later he developed more interest in light design.
He collaborates with a number of Dutch, Flemish, and Chinese dance and theatre companies, including Hotel Modern, 2move Dance Company, Waterhuis, Gato Bizar, Panama Pictures, Monk, Conny Janssen danst, Isabelle Bernaert, Bitter Sweet Dance, Guangdong Modern Dance Company, and the Living Dance Studio. His works have toured nationally and internationally, such as La biennale de Lyon—Art et Danse, Festival d'Automne à Paris, the Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Festival Circolo, Kunstfest Weimar, Julidans Festival, i-Dance Festival (Hong Kong), BOK Festival (Macao), ReActor—Shanghai Power Station of Art. He teaches in the Department of Dance and Department of Circus at Codarts University for the Arts in Rotterdam, and frequently collaborates with dance makers at Dansateliers Rotterdam—an independent house for contemporary dance.
LIU Zhuying （Performer）
LIU is a choreographer and dancer. She is also an associate researcher of National People’s Culture Series.
In September 1970, in order to perform The Red Detachment of Women, LIU joined the Kunming Song and Dance Troupe, and has been pursuing her dancing career ever since.
From 1982 to 1987, LIU taught Chinese Folk Dance at Kunming’s Art School for the Youth. In 1987, she joined Kunming Cultural Center and worked as a choreographer.
Her choreographic credits include: the Opening Ceremony of the Kunming International Horticultural Exposition, the Opening Ceremony of the National Ethnic Minority Sports Games, dance performances at the Kunming International Tourism Festival, and the Closing Ceremony of the Fifth China Golden Rooster & Hundred Flowers Film Festivals. She was the chief director of the 2008 Summer Olympics Torch Relay in Kunming. She received a number of outstanding teaching awards, and was a recipient of Galaxy Award in 2007, awarded by the Ministry of Culture.
Lei Yan （Performer）
Lei Yan, dancer, born in Hubei in 1986. She was graduated from Beijing Dance Academy in 2008. Then she danced in Beijing Modern Dance Company from 2009 to 2011. Joined Tao Dance Theater in the end of 2011. She became a freelance dancer since 2014, worked in different artists’ projects, such as Dekalog, 500 Meters of Paper Tiger Studio, Exit of Untitled Group, and started to join live space performance. She also worked with her husband Lian Guodong in Time, Encounter, I Didn’t Say Anything.
LI YUYAO （Performer）
Independent dancer/choreographer/director
Graduated from the Minzu university of China dance choreographer master, winner of bronze prize of choreography group in the 4th Beijing international ballet and choreography competition.
In 2017, I joined Beijing living dance studio and cooperated with Beijing modern dance company, paper tiger drama studio, Czech Archa theater, art troupe of Minzu university of China, Evergrande song and dance troupe of China and other domestic and foreign groups for many times. She participated in dance umbrella festival in the UK, the Europa art festival in Rome, the in unit of festival D'Avignon in France, the French autumn art festival, the Next-festival in France etc.
Works: "miyinu" (the yi nationality), "so be it", "after dark", body drama "tomorrow", contemporary theater "stick, tiger, chicken". these works have been shortlisted in "youth dance exhibition" of Beijing international dance biweekly, Beijing Nanluoguxiang drama festival, Beijing youth drama festival, sino-dutch international dance art festival, and exchange drama exhibition of Ohio state university in the United States.
WEN Luyuan - Dake （Musician）
Dake developed an early interest in music and played guitar at age of 9. He graduated from the Art Institute of China Coal Mine Art Troupe in 1999, with majors in Composition Theory in Chinese and Western Classical Music, and in Computer Music Composition. He won the champion of PLAM, a China’s electric guitar competition for professional guitarists in 2008.
He began to collaborate with the Beijing based Caochangdi Workstation in 2006, and has worked as live sound artist/designer and composer for the Living Dance Studio ever since. He is the composer of Listening to Third Grandmother’s Story, and Red. In 2013, he also joined the band of Zheng Jun—a Chinese folk-rock singer-songwriter. From 2016 participated in the Archa theater production "ordinary people" in Prague as a live guitarist and a live music producer.
In 2019, he cooperated with dou wei to release the "twilight king of liangwen" series
ZHOU Jie （Set Designer）
Born in 1965, ZHOU is a set designer of Shanghai Opera House. He designs, creates, and works on his art in multiple forms and across multiple disciplines, including painting, installation, sculpture, film, and etc.
In the past two decades, ZHOU not only collaborated with internationally known directors on large-scale stage productions, films, TV shows, but also participated in a series of art festivals. His recent artistic credits include: Aida, The Grandmaster, the Ninth Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the National Ethnic Minority Sports Games, etc.
His oil paintings, installations, and sculptures have been exhibited in galleries, public spaces, and sought after by art collectors.
Nannan Jia （technical director）
Extensive working experience as a Technical Director for theatre and stage, Production Stage Manager, and Documentary Director
A wide selection of international festivals has showcased Nannan's work, including the Shanghai Biennial, MITsp –International Theatre Festival of São Paulo, Wiener Festwochen (the Vienna Festival), Malta International Theatre Festival in Poznan, the Singapore Theatre Festival, Theater der Welt by ITI in Essen, Germany, Swiss Culturescape Festival, Festival/Tokyo (F/T), etc. Nannan's documentary My Grandpa's Winter was nominated for the Tampere Film Festival
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