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Dance with Third Grandmother

Wen Hui

Release year: 2015

Run time: 15 mins

Film type: Documentary

Synopsis

Ever since I finished the documentary film Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories in 2011, I wanted to transform it for the stage. In 2012, I went back to the village where my third grandmother lived and rehearsed with her. This short video work analyses the rational of “forgetting” and “being forgotten”, “why do we forget?” and “why is it forgotten?” These are all the reasons that I went to search for the existence of my third grandmother. Why do we dance? I want to use her story and her destiny to reflect upon our own dilemmas nowadays, as painful as it is peeling off the skins.

 

Director biography

Wen Hui is a choreographer and dancer who also makes documentary films and installations. She is the pioneer of Chinese contemporary interdisciplinary art. She formed Living Dance Studio in Beijing in 1994 and has participated in curating and organizing numerous art projects. Wen Hui insists on using theatre as an intervention into society and has been researching the ways the body forms an archive of personal social documentation, using personal means to experiment on how bodily memory catalyses collision between history and reality.