Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm

Although the Cultural Revolution ranks among the most far-reaching events in Communist China, inquiries into the era are still taboo in every-day China. Nevertheless, choreographer Wen Hui and documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang dare to look back in time in their piece Memory. While soldiers march past burning piles of books and countless children hail the Great Chairman Mao in excerpts from propaganda films and dramatic revolutionary operas, Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang take the audience on a fragile and challenging journey into their own childhood in 1960’s China. While the Cultural Revolution raged outside, the bed became a stage, the mosquito net transformed into a theatre curtain and family members became audience inside Wen Hui’s parent’s house. The net that now spans the Mousonturm stage is gigantic. From a child’s perspective everything is oversized and elongated. A sewing machine holds the world together and measures the time. Wen Hui’s personal memories translate into an intense, almost meditative dance and mix with the voices of five former Red Guards from Wu Wenguang’s documentary film My Time in the Red Guards. Out of the ever more dense maelstrom of images and stories, grows a inextricable tension between individual memory and the power of state-produced images and paroles, between former childish enthusiasm and the doubts and tears of shame arising in retrospect.
In Chinese with German surtitles.

Choreography: Wen Hui * Performer: Wen Hui, Li Xinmin, Wu Wenguang * Dramaturge/Videodesign: Wu Wenguang * Text: Wu Wenguang, Wen Hui * Music: Wen Bin * Cartoon film: Hao Zhiqiang * Light Designer: Eduard Steenbergen * Technical Direction: Jia Nannan * Videotechnician: Zou Xueping * Sound: Luo Bing * Chinese with German surtitles * Duration 8 hours.