Living Dance Studio | performances in Vienna and Poznan

Chinese artists Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang (Living Dance Studio) present Memory in the Wiener Festwochen festival, Vienna (May 16-19) and Malta Festival Poznań, Poland (July 6-7). In Vienna, Living Dance Studio presents a one hour and an eight hour version of Memory, a meditative reconstruction of dancer and choreographer Wen Hui’s childhood during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Her moving personal recollections are interlaced with poignant interviews with Red Guard victims and perpetrators. When Wen Hui was a child, the Cultural Revolution was raging outside; inside, her bed was a stage, the mosquito net above it was the curtain, and her family was the audience. In Memory, one of the most impressive, moving and at the same time encyclopaedic theatre events of recent years, the founder, dancer and choreographer of the Beijing-based Living Dance Studio recalls the past, remembering everything she can: a highly personal, subjective as well as meditative and documentary-realistic kaleidoscope of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong – dilated, conjured up and reanimated as if in a time bubble or viewed through a burning lens. A gigantic mosquito net hovers above the stage; everything is huge and moving in slow motion, filtered through a child’s memory; a sewing machine clamps the world together and makes it keep time. The Poznan performances of Memory are of the 1 hour version.