Dancing Minstrels on the Scene
Claudia Albertini
Images from the Living Dance Studio.
For those not very familiar with the Chinese new documentary movement, the director Wu Wenguang-known as the leading figure of the Urban Generation of filmmakers, and spokesperson for the ‘on location’ aesthetic-is the eye behind the camera that is creatively coordinating avant-garde dance performances at one of the largest contemporary arts events in Beijing, the Dashanzi Arts Festival.
After around 20 years of cinematic activities, screening documentaries at film festivals worldwide, in the 1990s Wu Wenguang turned his attention to what critics have categorized as ‘live art’ (xianchang yishu) practices. Founder of China’s first independent dance/theatre company, the Beijing Living Dance Studio, Wu has introduced versatile work that is defined by his experienced documentary filmmaker’s eye, his expertise behind a DV camera and his strong sensibility towards contemporary dance. In addition to incorporating new experimental technologies, Wu’s productions play a significant role in broadening the discourse on time-based and site-specific visual art practices. Using a wide range of media and disciplines, he invites dancers to explore and feature their perspectives on daily life, searching for people’s responses and reactions.
"Sometimes you feel like you are on a rollercoaster," Wu says, as his work both gives voice to common people’s sensitivity to current social phenomena and creates a new experimental idiom. Through dance movements, Wu narrates the spontaneity of his characters’ emotions. He highlights the interactions between time and space and intricately synthesizes the constructs of the theater set and reality; Wu records private thoughts and actions in the language of real life.
These aspects will coalesce and "come into light at Dashanzi," Wu states. On the occasion of the second edition of the Arts Festival, Wu curates and coordinates the local program performed with the Beijing Living Dance Studio and performers from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Together with a few individuals, members of dance companies and choreographers, he strolls around the Art District telling ordinary stories in "physical language." His challenge is to create a comprehensive project structured within three dance/theatre performances that "swim against the current and the marketplace." Recognized as multimedia expressions, they also involve sound arrangements, video and computer based-projections.
In response to the title of this year’s event, "language/fable" (yuyan/yuyan), Wu explores the language of the body in order to narrate the story of a peculiar place and peculiar emotional states. He approaches the contemporary theme of ‘privacy rendered public,’ stimulating self-revelation and what he describes as a "challenge between our view and the concept of what private lives are."
Veiled by his shadowing-presence, Wu Wenguang presents a Temperature Report. In this first piece, he documents the routine and the personal acts of everyday life in modern China as though narrating a fable. Urban legends become visible when materialized in the movements of the body. Winding around the peripheral sphere of quotidian life, so close that the fable seems to penetrate psychological patterns of the culture, Wu’s narration enlivens physical interactions.
Wu’s reflections on idioms, in which he perceives the existence of a language within a specific time and a defined space, are brought to life in the second project, Divided Spaces. Five choreographers are invited to present their singular works in the same time and at the same place. A dynamic interplay of narrative and documentary approaches, the result of these pieces lies in the spectators’ experiential synthesis of these performances as a single dance made of different styles and dance characters.
The third project, Performance in-situ, seems to be the best expression of the combination of Dashanzi Festival’s topic and its physical context. Again, teams of dancers explore the boundaries of time and space. While moving around the old Bauhaus 798 Factory, staging diverse interventions and performances, they tell a story about a space. Supervised and recorded by the attentive eye of the ‘documentarian,’ their movements reflect the context of the changes that have occurred on that particular site. The filmmaker is on the scene, as if on location.
As Wu explains, "being on location, (xianchang), represents a cinematic operation in the present tense by virtue of being present on the scene. The virtue of this method is embedded in the sensitivity towards the relation between subject and object." Filmmaker, artists and viewers are gathered in the same place, at the same time to listen to a fable narrated through a "physical language." Wu’s mastery lies in the freedom of this synthesis.
