| “Bodies discovering dreams” is the theme of this year’s Beijing International Dance Festival, an event that started in 2004 and that, for the first time, dedicates an annual contribution to the cultural environment of the capital city while providing the artists with more communication opportunities. From this perspective, body and language are today brought onto the stage in a crossing discourse that wants to see autochthonous and foreign energies amalgamate to build a new performance platform. |  |
Movements Creating Time And Space – Claudia Albertini
“Bodies discovering dreams” is the theme of this year’s Beijing International Dance Festival, an event that started in 2004 and that, for the first time, dedicates an annual contribution to the cultural environment of the capital city while providing the artists with more communication opportunities. From this perspective, body and language are today brought onto the stage in a crossing discourse that wants to see autochthonous and foreign energies amalgamate to build a new performance platform.
Nine Theatres, in cooperation with Beijing Orient Pioneer Theatre, Living Dance Studio and Beijing Modern Dance Experimental Theatre, have planned the Beijing International Dance Festival 2006 held in the Fall. The festival is undertaken in several units of performances including “Crossing 2006,” “Sino-European Arts Study Seminar” and “Orient Theatre Performance,” and there are a total of 20 groups and companies—including 12 foreign and eight Chinese groups—joining the performances, lectures, seminars and working studio activities.
As Wu Wenguang, co-founder of the Beijing Living Dance Studio, stated, “the idea is to provide a space for contemporary stage works to cross paths with audiences who want to experience challenging works.” Contemporary performance ensembles in China are still relatively few and the pieces showcased at the festival are hardly ever performed in front of a mainland Chinese audience. However, people who wish to be creative or to perform are starting to exist within the younger generation, but the opportunities and possibilities are still too few. This project wants to be a stimulus and to encourage more young people to create and to present new works.
Among the different occasions on schedule for the event, there are a few that I believe will prove extremely interesting and inspiring. If, on the one side, the event offers workshops such as those presented by Angelique Charmey Chemin from the Florent Theatre in Paris (France) in which the author talks to us about creative construction, then, on the other, the choreographer Anouk van Dijk, from the Netherlands, exploits traditional theatrical boundaries in order to examine relationships between the audience and the performer.
Through spontaneous and intimate actions, Chemin, the young French woman, directs a group of people in learning how to relate to each other in a very subtle sense. Unconsciously, curious souls get together and find themselves on the stage of a theatrical conduction: moving within the space, exploring inner boundaries and playing with inanimate objects. With control of breath, muscles relaxed and a perception of the emptiness, the bodies inhabit a new dimension. Everything is possible once you have discovered your dream.
Anouk’s curious perspective instead uses math as a leitmotif throughout the conception of her astounding piece, STAU. The word “stau” describes a brief moment between the transition of states; the split second between the wave peaking and breaking. It is a state of being caught in a void between initiation and actualization.
On a small, square stage confined by the chairs where the spectators sit, four dancers present a story. Every gesture resembles part of a sentence that has been dissected and reassembled within the discourse of the performance. The choreographer makes calculations and geometrically analyses the performance space, coordinating the overall narrative of the piece. The confined square stage thus opens out into an expansive, limitless space. Everything is on the cusp of happening: as stau develops and spaces shift, the relationship between spectators and performers becomes increasingly involved and connected.
With agile and unexpected movements, the dancers slide into the audience’s space and explore their reactions. Intimate, exact, they expand into dynamic, spectacular movements, executed with exhilarating speed and precision. They talk about something, and the miscellany of their attempts builds up a story. Playful, moving, endearing and theatrical, Stau’s physical proximity evolves into emotional intimacy. The experience of contemporary dance becomes a dialogue, which continues in real life.
An arrival at an unknown place, with all of the difficulties of language barriers, communication, behavior, interpretations and misunderstandings, is the basis of the cooperation work Outlanders, performed by the Living Dance Studio (Beijing) and Antje Pfundtner (Germany). This piece offers an interesting interpretation of the concept of contemporary dance, showing how often the boundaries between experimental theatre and dance performance seem to disappear and to become a unique and comprehensive discourse. Analyzing the word “outlanders” (which doesn’t actually exist, just as the “home” does not exist as a place but rather as a desire that is always there where we aren’t any more), Bernhard Schlink explains that the choreographers express their feeling on this condition by creating a very attention-grabbing piece. The performers attest that collaboration is not just a simple cultural exchange, but also a deep research of understanding and misunderstanding, and these ideas’ complications. And thus, these complications occur when trying to mingle two completely different ways of thinking and expressing.
Animated corollaries to the festival, all of the activities spreading around Beijing this fall season, are energetic forces that want to give space to what is probably still behind the curtains, but that is definitely a building up of an intense curiosity towards the body and its inner motives.
