Living Dance Studio, Beijing
Memory II: Hunger
Location: Frankfurt LAB (Gallus)
Performance/Choreography/Film
- 03.09.2015, 7 p.m.€ 12,- / red. € 6,-, Memory II: Hunger - 6.30 p.m. introduction, artist talk afterwards
The massive mismanagement of China’s agricultural collectivisation, the “Great Leap Forward” caused the largest case of famine known worldwide to this day with up to 40 million dead between 1959 and 1961. As part of the documentary piece The Folk Memory Project, Living Dance Studio faces the taboos still in place from official side to this day: over the last few years, young members of the group have been traveling to the provinces as “story seekers”. So far, they have visited dozens of villages and interviewed more than 400 survivors of the great famine. In Memory II: Hunger the interviewers themselves take to the stage, describe and comment on the documentary material and in doing so renegotiate the relationship between the individual and the collective, body and mass, and between body and memory.
In Chinese with English Surtitles.
Concept & Direction: Wu Wenguang * Choreography: Wen Hui * By and with: Zhang Mengqi, Zou Xueping, Li Xinmin, Shu Qiao, Wang Haian, Guo Rui, Jia Zhitan.
Lecture about the The Folk Memory Project on 31 August at Mousonturm.
Biography
Living Dance Studio, Beijing
The Living Dance Studio was founded in 1994 by filmmaker Wu Wenguang and choreographer and former Pina Bausch dancer Wen Hui as the first independent contemporary company in the People’s Republic of China. Until recently, they were able to work in the Caochangdi Work Station in Beijing, designed specially for them by artist Ai Weiwei. Their productions, in which dance, text and film are often combined into total works of art, document social and historical events from China’s past and present.