Choreographer Wen Hui has had a formative influence on China’s independent dance scene. For many years she has used dance and film to examine the institutional control and oppression of women’s bodies. In doing so, she explores the body as a repository and archive of individual memories and the traces that society has left behind in it. A key object of Wen Hui’s research has been her own body, which she has investigated as it has aged. In the three-hour workshop that accompanies her world premiere New Report on Giving Birth, Wen Hui invites women aged 50 and over to discover their own bodies as archives and to adopt new approaches to their own experiences in which individual biographies have overlapped with social contexts. Looking back at the past can also reveal possibilities for our own futures.