Abstract

Chapter 5 centers on dancer, choreographer, and multi-media artist Wen Hui's two experimental films made with her “forgotten” Third Grandmother. Their intimate-public camera constructs female kinship outside the patriarchal family tree and re-writes women's history through oral storytelling and choreography of the everyday.

Keywords: documentary theater, body and memory, intimate-public camera, oral history, choreography of the everyday

On May 26, 2021, Germany's Goethe Institute announced that the choreographer, dancer, and artist Wen Hui 文慧 (b. 1960), was one of the three recipients, “communicators who go beyond borders,” of the Goethe Medal for the year. The jury states: “Wen Hui stands for the independent and highly creative independent art scene in China, embodying cultural diversity and the broad spectrum of everyday stories beyond official narratives.” This chapter is centered on a pair of innovative non-fictional films, which exemplify the dynamic fusion between “elements of documentary film and themes from everyday life” observed by the jury. They were made by Wen Hui with a long-forgotten elderly female kin living in a mountain village in Yunnan in southwest China.

Flashback to February 2011, Wen Hui left Beijing for her hometown Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in southwest China. She went there to spend the Spring Festival with her family and start researching a new project. This homeward journey resulted in a remarkable film, Listeningto Third Grandmother's Stories (2012, 听三奶奶讲过去的故事 hereafter Listening), exploring the complicated connections between kinship, women’s life-writing, and generational bonds across the span of nearly a century of modern China. After Third Grandmother (unrelated by blood) passed away, a short sequel, Dancing with the Third Grandmother (和三奶奶跳舞 hereafter Dancing), was completed in 2015 and exhibited as a video installation at a multimedia exhibition at the Venice Biennale's China Pavilion in 2016.

While the two films may belong to a burgeoning first-person documentary practice in China since the DV-turn around 2000, they depart from preceding works through an improvisational, choreographed documentary theater mode and the subsequent inter-media reproduction and exhibition. This is in part attributable to Wen Hui's background as a pioneer in modern dance and avant-garde theater in China.