Body as Archive: Body Workshop and Documentary Screening

Photo by Li Xinmin

Featuring Wen Hui, Zou Xueping and Li Xinmin (Living Dance Studio, Beijing)

Presented by the Asian Film and Media Initiative in the Department of Cinema Studies.

Since the 1990s, Wen Hui, China’s leading independent dancer, choreographer, performance artist and filmmaker, has been exploring the body as archive and medium for the remembering and recovery of personal and collective history, especially women’s history. The day will kick off with a body workshop open to all audience members. It will be followed by screenings of documentaries by the three performers/filmmakers and a roundtable discussion.

Artists’ statement on the body workshop:

“An experience of embodied communication, of affective perception of happening.  You are already here when you enter. The body is the archive of individual memory, the encounter provides one with an opportunity to touch the past and understand the future. Through bodily experience and eyes’ perception we see space (which may be unlimited) and its orientations. Searching for multiple possibilities of bodily expression, participants together experiment in the process of mutual enlivening between numbness and curiosity.”

Co-sponsored by the Center for Religion and Media, NYU; Department of East Asian Studies; and China House at NYU. 

Body Workshop

11:00 am: Performance Studies Studio, 721 Broadway, Room 612

Please wear clothing suitable for easy movement.

Screenings and Discussion

Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6 th Floor

1:30 pm: The Village of Fools (Zou Xueping, 2014, 80min)

3:30 pm: The Memorial at Huamulin (Li Xinmin, 2015, 70m)

4:45 pm: Dance with the Third Grandma (Wen Hui, 2016, 15min), followed by roundtable discussion with Wen Hui, Zou Xueping, Li Xinmin and Prof. Angela Zito (Anthropology, NYU), moderated by Prof. Zhen Zhang (Cinema Studies, NYU).