Wen Hui I am 60
[Dance]
In an intricate three-dimensional puzzle, the secret of which she is the holder, Wen Hui, combining a mixture of bodies in motion, archives, video projection, texts and musical creation, brings back to life Chinese progressive cinema with feminist concerns of the 1930's. It becomes the basis for a dialogue between its protagonists and feminist practices today.
In an intricate three-dimensional puzzle, the secret of which she is the holder, Wen Hui, combining a mixture of bodies in motion, archives, video projection, texts and musical creation, brings back to life Chinese progressive cinema with feminist concerns of the 1930's. It becomes the basis for a dialogue between its protagonists and feminist practices today.
According to Chinese philosophy, the age of sixty years old is the age of a renaissance. Starting from this turning point, the sixty year-old choreographer embarks on an open reflection on the mark left by the New Woman movement of the early 20th century and its aftermath. Building on a long process of research and development in collaboration with Zhang Zhen, a feminist scholar specializing in early and contemporary Chinese cinema at New York University, and in dialogue with other women from different generations, I am 60 transforms the power of history and reality into onstage energy. Set against films of breathtaking sensitivity that bear witness to the harshness of social and gender inequalities, as well as political engagement of women in the 1930's, the choreographer calls upon the “documentary bodies” of herself and other past and present "performers," to reveal their respective individual and collective experiences. Women's intimate stories overshadowed by national grand narratives are articulated and connected by going back and forth between internal and external dimensions, and dramatic and cinematic spaces, in a unique blend of documentary and dance.
