About When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer

Two retired ballet dancers, aged 81 and 58, from National Ballet of China are the protagonists of this performance. They are about to share their own thoughts over dance. Along the performance, they each would find an alternative way to dance, which very much differentiates from their familiar fields of ballet.

The two dancers still live in their own pasts, in which they were still dancing ballet. The historical past appears in the present bodies, illuminating the cultural pasts and the memories of the revolutionary ballet. When they start to re-read their bodies, what is remembered conflicts with what is present. Through this process, they are tampering with previous memories, fantasizing the past while forging, accepting the new body.

Through releasing the tension and relativizing the center of focus, the aging ballet dancers awake from their dreaming in the past. The aging dancers lost their modern consciousness of the center, which they used to hold in their ballet bodies. The aging of the modern appears in the moment of aging ballet dancers dancing.

Credits

　　

Director/Choreographer: Wang Mengfan

Performer: Cao Zhiguang, LIU Guilin

Production Supervisor: Fabrizio Massini (Italy)

Producer: Zhang Cui

Text: Chen Danlu

Composer/Sound Design: Tan Shuoxin

Dance Dramaturge: Nanako Nakajima (Japan)

Stage/Costume Design: Li Xingni

Light Design: Xu Yin

Choreography Assistant: Hu Chengcheng

Visual Design: LiiDesign

Photography: Wu Shi

Acknowledgement: Venue Support: Goethe-Institut China

This project has been supported by Ibsen International.

About Wang Mengfan

Born in 1990, Wang Mengfan works as independent theater director and choreographer. Her theater project 50/60 - Dance Theater with Dama (2015/16) was premiered at the Beijing Nanluoguxiang Performing Arts Festival and invited to the VIE Festival in Bologna afterwards. At the 2017 Beijing Fringe Festival, she presented her second dance theater piece "The Divine Sewing Machine", which featured thirteen children. The performers in her both pieces are not professional actors, but rather belong to a particular group, according to their social identities. Focusing on the connection between the human body and mind, she helps the performers to explore their own performative expression in the theater. In 2018, she participated International Forum of Berliner Theatertreffen as one of the scholars. At the same time, she is selected as "Dance Hopeful (Hoffnungsträger)" by German dance magazine tanz in its yearbook 2018.