2013-11-22

Dance In Vancouver 2013: Made In China v2

THE 9TH BIENNIAL DANCE IN VANCOUVER FESTIVAL 

Program One:
Wen Wei Dance - Made in China v.2

Wednesday November 20, 7pm + Saturday November 23, 9pm
The Dance Centre 
http://thedancecentre.ca/events/dance_in_vancouver_2013

Wen Wei Wang’s intimate new work is a collaboration with Gao Yanjinzi, Artistic Director of Beijing Modern Dance Company, Qiu Xia He, of Vancouver’s Silk Road Music and Sammy Chien, of New Media Art CollectiveChimerik 似不像. Through dance, music, storytelling and new media they explore individual personal narratives that are bound by a shared Chinese heritage, and how their traditional artistic forms have evolved in a modern world.

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this is our second collaboration of the work-in-progress version of Made In China. I'm very excited about this piece, as the last time we had a very deep and experiential movement, audio, visual and a very intuitive energy flow… This time we are experimenting with a bit more context and dynamics. We had a very interesting and organic 6 days of rehearsal, working with these genius, so much has arrived to the table. How do I keep it up and keep it down at the same time? Jinzi is 6 months pregnant, too. I'm taking one of her part from the last piece into a very weird version of my own movement. Wen Wei tells a story while Qiu Xia dances. And for the first time, you'll hear Jinzi speaking English on stage. As cliché as it sounds, we all stepped out of our comfort zone towards interdisciplinarity.

I would like to give a BIG THANK YOU shout out to Mark Coniglio, the creator of Isadora (arguably the most creative real-time audiovisual software for performance environment up to date), the Artistic Director of Troika Ranch (the pioneer company for digital performance) and one of the most important new media artist/educator today. He sacrifice his utmost valuable time to help me get through an unexpected technical issue in the software, not only to show his love of art and also a huge encouragement to the young interdisciplinary artist who's still struggling between the both sides of the brain. 

I believe though, that creativity can also come from understanding technicality and even beneath codes/technology, without such a flexibility and intuitive quality in my tools, I wouldn't be able to create something like this--a truly organic and creative process with dance, music, film and new media that includes live sound processing, live audiovisual and real-time/reactive video. Most importantly, it all slowly becoming more and more natural, as if these separated fields really morphed in this common playground, and we're all playing, with our bodies, intellect and find resonances in our soul… the tools that we have, are the extensions of our imagination. 

Sammy 

Photography by Chris Randle & Sophia Wolfe — with Wen Wei Wang at The Dance Centre.


(photo from Made In China v.1, Dancing on the Edge Festival 2013)







Made in China v2 for DIV