Wen Hui

Wen Hui is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary dance theatre. A choreographer and dancer, she also makes documentary films and installations. She graduated in choreography from the Beijing Dance Academy in 1989 and in 1994 studied modern dance in New York. In 1994, together with film-maker Wu Wenguang, she founded China’s first independent dance-theatre company, the Living Dance Studio. Her work examines the way in which the body preserves archives of personal social documentation and experiments with how bodily memory induces the connection between history and reality. In her work The Report on Giving Birth (1999), she interviewed a group of women about their experiences of childbirth and used the body as a strategy of resistance to show the complexity of women at that time. Red (2015) is a reflection on opera as a political and cultural symbol and its role in the collective consciousness during the revolution in China. In 2023, she created New Report on Giving Birth at the Mousonturm in Frankfurt. The play was presented at the Théâtre de la Ville as part of the Festival d’Automne. In 2004, Living Dance Studio’s Report on Body won the ZKB Patronage Prize at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel. Wen Hui’s work has received a great deal of international attention. In 2021, she was awarded the official Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Goethe Medal.

Encounter with Body Memory
“The theme of our workshop is bodily memory. The body is the archive of personal memory, and meetings give people the opportunity to make contact with their past and to grasp the future. We argue that personal bodily memory has a connection with social change and the traces of history. We’ll also explore the tension between the experience of time. The workshop will dissect my past creations, dealing with the relationship between the body and the image, involving some interviewing and filming skills with which we will study memory, sensation, transmission and the passage of time. During the interview, you think very carefully about your question before you ask it... it is a very intense state and “listening” becomes a physical movement. This workshop values the inclusion of young people’s voices, and during the week we’ll also have a video artist presenting how he works with choreographers and dancers. We will draw on the concept that the body contains an internal archive as a starting point for infinite documentation. We search for multiple possibilities of bodily expression and try out the process of how indifference and curiosity revitalise each other.”