Wen Hui New Report on Giving Birth

[Dance]

Twenty-four years after Report of Giving Birth, the flagship piece which marked the debuts of her notoriety in France, Wen Hui opens a new chapter in her exploration of sate interventionism on the woman’s body. Drawing on dance and video testimonies, she delicately interweaves the political with the intimate.

The single child policy put in place by the Chinese government in 1979 is of course no longer an issue. However, with the onset of official discourses claiming that gender equality has last been reached, the question of the relationship between the institutional powers and the bodies of women remains intact. Since 2021, in China, the regime has been officially encouraging women to have three children, a situation which has lead to new discriminations in the workplace. In June 2022, in the United States, the Supreme Court rejected the right to abortion which had been established in 1973. Whether it is a matter of demographic crises or the defence of patriarchal values, it is the bodies of women that bear the brunt. Performed by four dancers from different origins and generations, the dance is written in collusion with the constant interplay between real-life accounts, and sound, text and visual-based documents, a field in which the Living Dance Studio has become an expert. Alternating between onstage present and archive footage or projections, the piece puts together a complex mosaic of situations whilst mapping out hypothetical avenues for resistance and liberation.