Honored with the Goethe Medal: the Chinese choreographer Wen Hui – Culture

Wen Hui gave herself the best present for her sixtieth birthday last year: her first solo project, a piece with the avowed title “I am 60”. The Chinese dancer and choreographer uses images and film material to sense her own story, her injuries and imprints. The question arises: How did I become the woman I am?

You learn a lot about them personally. For example, that there are hardly any childhood photos of her, unlike her brother, the firstborn. And that she always thought it was because she was “so ugly”. Wen Hui, who has remained childless, also relates that she had her first abortion in 1980, which was associated with pain, feelings of shame and loss of face. The procedure was performed without anesthesia. Then she went straight back to ballet class. And she says that the man she loved and with whom she lived for 34 years cheated on her. That it plunged her into the worst crisis of her life. In 2014 they separated. He was also her artistic partner in the jointly founded Living Dance Studio, China’s first independent dance theater company.

While Wen Hui’s narrative voice comes off the tape, she makes dance movements on stage, often only very minimal ones. A swing, a tremor, a freezing of the body, a conducting with the hands, a painting in the air. Sometimes it seems as if she wants to catch pictures of the head with her arms, to hold memories, to order, to examine. Her delicate body sways like a stalk in the wind. It is often bent backwards: strong breeze! But Wen Hui stands up to her. As in almost all of her works, the Chinese woman with her delicate corporeality fits in between the photo and video projections on the stage, is their master as well as their victim. It is their story that is pieced together, pars pro toto. Combined with old film clips from the Shanghai cinema of the 1930s and statistical facts on the disadvantage of women in all areas of Chinese society, it becomes much more than just a self-portrait.

As a video is running that shows her dancing with her mother (mother leads!), The real Wen Hui suddenly gets out of step on the stage of the Weimar E-Werk and vigorously moves her left foot as if she wanted to shake something off. A heavy burden? The dancer limps to the “time out” sign and the performance is interrupted: she has been stung by a wasp. In the middle of the stage, in the middle of the foot. Employees of the Weimar Art Festival, during which Wen Hui’s play was premiered, keep their feet cool, and Rolf Hemke, director of the festival, speaks in his announcement of a “consequence of the pandemic” since the E-Werk has not been used for a long time , and during this time a wasp’s nest had formed in the old walls. This was recently fumigated. But apparently one or the other insect is still stumbling around. Ouch.

As she later told in conversation, Wen Hui was stabbed during rehearsals – in the arm – and a third time immediately after the interrupted performance: in the right index finger, on which she is now wearing a plaster. She shows her hand, which is as small as a child’s. Stabbed but not broken. She went on, (almost) without showing anything. Although it hurt, “yes, that was.”

But what are a few wasp stings against the unreasonable demands of life! Wen Hui knows a lot about the latter, especially as a woman in China. In her works with titles such as “Report on Body” or “Report on Giving Birth”, she has repeatedly dealt with the socio-political conditions in China with almost journalistic zeal, with their impact on people’s lives and their bodies, especially on women . According to her choreographic credo: “Every body has a stamp”, shaped by experience, suffering, memories.

“It’s not about women fighting men, but ultimately about human rights.”

The recourse to the body as a “reflective archive” in connection with elements of the documentary film and completely normal everyday stories makes Wen Hui an exceptional artist in her home country. With her Living Dance Studio she belongs to the avant-garde of dance theater in China and has made guest appearances at all major festivals in Europe. Not a bad reason to award them the Goethe Medal, this honorary medal of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded annually by the Goethe Institute since 1955 on August 28, the birthday of the greatest poet namesake, in Weimar – a recognition for services to international cultural exchange.

This year, the medal also went to the social economist and president of the cultural organization “doual’art” Princess Marilyn Douala Manga Bell from Cameroon and the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa. But only Wen Hui was personally present in Weimar. The others were able to follow the ceremony including the awarding of the award by the delightfully vital new President of the Goethe Institute, Carola Lentz, as a live stream from the study center of the Anna Amalia Library. How it is in times of the pandemic.

Open detailed view

Carena Schlewitt, the artistic director of the Hellerau Art Center in Dresden, praised Wen Hui in her laudation as a “pioneer of contemporary dance”: “She gently calls for careful consideration and appreciation of the social role of women.” If you ask Wen Hui later in the interview whether she is a feminist, she hesitates briefly, then replies: “I dare to say that now that I am a feminist. For a long time I did not dare to.” Because the term has a very negative connotation in China, she sends afterwards, even with women. In addition, there is an “internalized patriarchal thinking” that she has also found in her mother and herself, “it is difficult to free yourself from it.” But she understood: “It’s not about women fighting men, but ultimately about human rights.”

Wen Hui has her long hair tied back, like in her solo. She is bare of make-up, but the kimono-like throw in which she is wrapped shines in a bright red with a lively white pattern. Clemens Treter, director of the Goethe-Institut Beijing, is at her side and is translating. The two have a trusting relationship. Since Wen Hui’s studio in the Caochangdi Workstation in a suburb of Beijing no longer exists, since 2014, the Goethe-Institut has made its rooms available to the choreographer, and after the piece “Red” it has now also co-produced “I am 60”.

Open detailed view

“Red”, premiered in 2015, was about the “model lopers” introduced under Mao Zedong at the time of the Chinese Cultural Revolution using a lot of research material and interviews with contemporary witnesses; especially about the propaganda production “The Red Women’s Battalion” from 1964, the first full-length Chinese ballet. It has burned itself into the collective memory of several generations of Chinese through overwhelming mass choreographies with exemplary, courageous (party) soldiers.

Wen Hui also dreamed of becoming one of these revolutionary showcase ballerinas as a girl, studying the steps and movements in front of the mirror. She is a child of this time, which is why she repeatedly deals with the inscriptions of the Cultural Revolution in heads and bodies in her work. She did this particularly impressively in the eight-hour project “Memory”, a hybrid of film documentary and dance performance, developed together with her long-term partner, the filmmaker Wu Wenguang: Wen Hui exposed on the stage, surrounded by a wide variety of projections and stories Evening of the most intimate impressions, insights and memories; followed by “Memory II: Hunger”, a dance research on the great famine that claimed millions of victims between 1959 and 1961 due to poor agricultural planning in China.

As a child, she was sent to perform loyalty dances in front of Mao’s images

Born in Yunnan in 1960, Wen Hui was sent as a child to so-called loyalty dances in front of Mao’s images, as was customary at the time. In the 1980s she studied traditional dance and choreography at the State Dance Academy in Beijing and then worked at the Oriental Song and Dance Ensemble. The decisive turning point came in the 1990s: she went to New York and Europe to study contemporary dance, also at the Folkwang University in Essen and in Pina Bausch’s dance company in Wuppertal. Working with Pina Bausch is a revelation for her. The most enlightening thing about it? This time Wen Hui’s answer comes quickly: “That every dancer and every dancer spoke for themselves with their own bodies.” In China, however, it was not about an individual expression, “but about group effects”.

The Living Dance Studio, which she founded with Wu Wenguang in 1994, allowed individuals to have their say, family members, friends, workers, villagers – people who otherwise have no voice. Often with topics that are taboo because they question official historiography. In “Listening to My Third Grandmother’s Stories” in 2011, Wen Hui visited her 83-year-old “third grandmother”, her father’s great aunt in the country, a very simple woman who never went to school, was married at twelve, at 14 had their first child and went through all the ups and downs of recent Chinese history.

This great aunt, almost toothless, also appears in “I am 60”, with which Wen Hui strikes a cross-generational arc. She actually wanted feminist activists from today’s China to have their say in the play, but the pandemic thwarted her plans. Too bad. The link with the young women’s movement under pressure is actually missing. But Wen Hui sees her solo as a “process” that she wants to continue working on. And there is also enough material. Wen Hui finds it laughable that the Chinese government is now turning away from the decades-long one-child policy and allowing three children per couple in the future, if not expected: “The state still determines the body, so it makes no difference.”

(In October Wen Hui is guest with “I am 60” at the Théâtre de la Ville Paris. She shows the piece at the beginning of November at the Spielart Festival in Munich.)