The company’s own workstation in Northern Beijing serves them both as a rehearsal and performance space, as well as a training centre and media lab. Even while still working on Memory, Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang began expanding their performative form of historical research into a project for the entire dance company: resulting in the Folk Memory Project. 20 young theatre makers and stage technicians betook themselves – in some case for the first time in their lives – as “story seekers” back to those villages in over ten Chinese provinces from where they or their families first came. There they searched for and interviewed eyewitnesses of the Great Famine of 1959-1961. The agricultural collectivization carried out under the slogan “The Great Leap Forward” caused between 15 and 45 million deaths through mismanagement by party leadership. In his talk, Wu Wenguang will extensively explain the company’s work on the Folk Memory Project based on film excerpts. Both outstanding stage productions produced using the material so far – “Hunger” and “Listening to Third Grandmother’s Stories” will be shown at Mousonturm end of August as part of the International Summer Lab, during which Wen Hui and members of the Living Dance Studio will also be teaching.
In English.

With Wu Wenguang