Live Performance Experience

No Man is an Island, contemporary dance, 2020.6

Silence Is Sitting on the Train, performance art, 2022.1

The Inner Body and Transformation, butoh, 2022.5

Conference of birds, community dance project, 2022.11

Other practices photos

Body Diary Photos

  • |坏蛋|

    egg, be, hatch, mistake

    two, round, ripe, mistake

    egg, be, hatch, mistake

    ……

  • |Watermelon|

  • |Cathelia|

    Cathelia is walking on the long road. All is the desert around, she is bared feet, naked neck,  and wading across this land. Going ahead. Going back. Going to the Water of Life. 

    Cathelia, Catherlia, walking on the desert of land. She is having her period, blood dropped into the arid sand; all drunken. The toe cap worn, no longer incisive and bright, it loses the direction pointed her way of next.

    Is it the Water of Life? I cried. 

    “It is the Water of Life!”, Cathelia cried. 

  • |By two laps|

    Prom

  • |∞|

    Attention

    Dryness

    The Self-loop

    qrf

  • |Walk a snow|

    1

    Moonlight

    Meet her lover

    Midnight

    Snow white

    2

    Pierce

    Without blood

    Pure harmonious hilarity

    3

    “Cooled.”

    ” Have the tea, please.”

    The day, I was going to Blank Space to see the exhibition A Higher Calling.

    It was the first snow, those atoms of me in my body and air were calling for a walk in the snow, and so I walked, and missed the exhibition.

    They said, “the Black Space is not open today”.

    In the higher calling of a day-walk in the snow in a call.

  • |In|

    All feels like on the edge

    All with an urge

    In white, and her red.

    Leave This Place!

  • |Perfect|

    Kids’ Parking Plot

Hello self-critical essay

Learning from my previous experience, it was easy getting into the situation of losing your voice when you were writing. To keep the drive, I set my character down at the beginning; it was a half-man who had no place to go. This was a helpful strategy, I also felt freer to write when not regarding it as a story about me. In addition, just like what Neil Gaiman said, your characters are part of you and will gradually separate from you.

My character had gone through five stages. In the beginning, he was just so happy that he felt love and warmth suddenly and wanted to say that out. Gradually, he felt there was something not very fit. He began to think about why and felt disgusted, and he fell into sadness later. In the end, he calmed down and only wanted everybody could be fine in the coming Christmas. It seemed random, but what my character faced was just the gap between unideal reality and pure love and one’s native wishes.

 After finishing the draft, I started to think about how to perform it to my audience- I decided to use the robot’s voice. It used s digital voice to say those strongly emotional sentences, and the contrast between the robot’s emotionless voice and my content is what I want my audience to feel. It showed the mixture of detachment and zeal and created the view of an outsider; like the set of the empty stage, the robot was watching everything in distance.

Moreover, I created many pauses between sentences or words when the robot spoke to provide space for the audience to feel emotions. One of them asked me how I made this, but the emotions were not from the robot’s tone but from the audience themselves. This is also why I love performance; it is the result between the performer and audience, and it must be real.

 Overall, learning from this experience, I will also focus more on the organization of show and my computer skills next time. To become a better writer, I will keep practising my English, keep thinking and creating, and more importantly, keep living my life with a bare heart.

Dancing Memory

“Memories are sensual images captured by our body of any experience of living. They are inside us, deep and running in our inner energetic rivers. When memories get out from our body they do it in impulses of movement and sound. Emotions are a result; emotions are a movement—— a consequence of memories, impulses and movement. 

Our dance is the external movement of our inner movement. Our ideal dance is that happening inside and outside the body, linking both.”

From Gustavo Thomas, my teacher

Kazuo Ohno

This is our December workshop. It contains four sections. We work in a small group online. I would like to express my sincere thanks to my beloved teacher, Gustavo, and everyone who participated.

Section 1

今天特别艰难,记忆这个东西对我来说特别艰难。我记忆很差,且平常不怎么在具体的事上,一般来说的现实——时间地点人物景观事件——总是流过我。

今天收获是很大的,「我的记忆」从消失、漂浮变成了一个困难,它出现,我感受到些些片刻的冲动和痛。

婴儿的练习

变成一个婴儿,你还没有观察世界和与自己身体的经验。躺着,只看得见天花板,蹬腿,抬起手,抓一抓,眼睛看,去观察,去带领探索的好奇。持续的努力,转头了,眼睛看到了很远的地方,你想要伸手去抓,但是够不到,小小的身体离那里还那么远,也看不清楚。要去,努力,努力,换了好几个无法企及的不清楚的远方,努力,又一次,你的世界一翻,你翻身了,又有一次,你的身体从一个片变成了几个柱,你爬……直到很久很久以后,世界才变成了你忽视的存在,你熟悉在一种无法再超越的境地。

婴儿的练习以后,我感觉自己有了一种「历史」的感觉,一些变化发生了,感觉多了一种「感觉」到自己,感觉到了像故事和小路一样的时间,一些关于叠加、继承、和感动(关怀?)的感觉。

记忆——我好像对它有了一种通路的感觉。

记忆在行为中,经历在行为中,创造(情感、思绪、意义)在行为中

Body memory
Proust:
“I RAISED TO MY LIPS A SPOONFUL OF THE TEA IN WHICH I HAD SOAKED A MORSEL OF THE CAKE … SUDDENLY THE MEMORY RETURNS. THE TASTE WAS OF THE LITTLE CRUMB OF MADELEINE WHICH ON SUNDAY MORNINGS AT COMBRAY … MY AUNT LÉONIE USED TO GIVE ME, DIPPING IT FIRST IN HER OWN CUP OF REAL OR OF LIME-FLOWER TEA.”

这篇记录是这个月结束了以后写的,现在我明白了这一部分——行动,是关于记忆,关于舞踏的基本,就像泥娃娃是泥做的一样。身体,这个太词意味深长了,个人又集体,公共又隐私,当下又古老,显而易见又暗流涌动。直接观察,也是柔软又僵硬,温热又暗冷,线条又曲折。

剥洋葱

Peeling the Onion - Wikipedia

Peeling the Onion
Layer by layer, Günter Grass reveals memories.
Skins beneath the skin.

Grass: “So, in order to complete this patchwork of memory, I started to peel the onion. Rounding out layer by layer, the onion seemed suitable to me to expose what had been and had disguised itself in the course of time.”

之后,我们跳舞,我的身体变得像干纸皮一样,像画皮,它干了,薄的抖的,表面的变成了一层,很强烈,我第一次有了一个想法:这不是我的身体,我的身体不是我。

这不好解释。有点像鼓面,鼓面破了,原来鼓不是什么东西,就是两层薄薄的皮,一个架子,加上一些空间,皮破了,鼓不是什么东西,空间也不是空间。鼓破了一层皮一晃神又看到还没完,里面还有一层,但已经不能说是皮,用感念摸上去,里面还有,吗?如果都是皮,里面是什么?没什么可能。

犹太男孩的故事

Gustavo讲了一个故事,具体我忘了,大概是一个男孩他最后发现自己小时候是纳粹战场上的一个男孩。

I was moved that time listening to him.

记得他还说了一句: appeared the truth

今日记录

翻页至 section 2 ——>>

Reflection on my work

Today is the performance day. I didn’t imagine much about today in purpose because I know it won’t work and it shouldn’t be needed. I just used to sink myself in the silence which I discovered if I get the chance to meet it and look for the chance patiently. There’s no effort on “showing” but all on dedicating awe and concentration on the reality that I sensed and the reality of being under people’s attention; you take their energy and lead that moment when they are being with you.

This is a small success, as I succeed in satisfying myself— I find the power in the presence again. This time, I recognize it more; this is what I want for art. I do have the will to express myself to strengthen my visible being, but what I really want is much more— I want the completion, complexity, the deepest silence, and lively natures.

Back to my performance today, people’s feedback helped me to find more about the work. A person told me he saw the scene of the battlefield at the first, then he felt the emotion of desperation. A person told me she felt strong desolation. I’m really happy to hear people have something from my work, but I was wishing someone to feel the essence of what I feel and the things that I want to show. There is some disappointment and unchangeable loss, whereas the thing I most want to propose is related to silence, as the name of this work. 

Finally, a person said about silence, and he directly mentioned its strongness. “I don’t know how to say, still speechless with enormous unshaped things behind. Cuz you work is discussing something unspeakable, right? I mean in a regular way. I was struck”, he said so.

Reflecting on my work after hearing those and seeing the pictures Mowen took for me, I find the whole vision of the work. At first, I stepped into the burned books and coals. I felt pressured and was in a state of being highly interactive with the environment. I slowly moved, there were things I want to spit and movement is the way of my non-speaking speech. I was independent, as the persistence in silence, but the independence is a reaction of opposing the inseparable decay; this was not the real independence because you were still guided by the things you opposed. This might be how people felt so, and this was the silence of saying without voice, not the silence that is sitting on the train. Along with the performance, I began gradually into silence at last. I don’t know if the people who mentioned the silence will still say so if he came at the beginning.

Some other reflect

How to use your mind in art: 

Finding the established relationship instead of dominating and reasoning materials as an uncourteous boss

Sparks:

The warm wind of the air conditioner is so good. I didn’t plan it at first until all other works in this exhibition were placed there and I found the hot wind, and it just warmed my place, making my work more powerful and revealing silence’s eternal dedicate natures. I am so glad that many people told me they felt it.

Things to improve:

the coal: In my design, I imagine the coal will be more luminous, as its alias 黑金. I should use real coal instead of charcoals.

the experiment for the final performance

Although people mentioned that I should do some experiments for the final performance like doing it in some other places, I still think it’s not that needed. Improvisation instead of a set of movements planned is an important part. People mostly didn’t think much about performance, even in contemporary art in my experience. In the simplest, one opinion about performance that I agreed with is performance is only the energy exchange within performer and audience. It’s not doing some sets of things in front of people or showing them some techniques. And improvisation is the kind of performance that involves the most awareness and is established by the presence. In my work, silence is only embodied in the world: because there is noise, we called the things besides “silence”. You can imaging this scene: In a running train, silence is sitting there; there is a kind of relationship between silence and the world. Just like in my work I lead people to see what the world is happening(my audience, the burned books) and there is something else in it but not subordinate to it. On one hand, I was curious about the whole scene of silence sitting on the train with all other passengers, on the other hand, I was curious about silence itself, who it actually is? Silence is not being voiceless, or it should be called quietness.

The design of the site can be improved, like thinking about how to differentiate with Tom’s and Harry’s performance, and how to more let people feel freer (they are so nervous facing “art”, many of them even didn’t come closer to read the notes I put. If they see the notes, they might not disregard Silence.)

Preparing

About art form

I choose the form of performance art and the improvisation way of performing.

It is a way to get rid of “making artwork” instead of art. It’s hard to say what is art, but “making artwork” is just making stuff in purpose, and mostly associated with profit and benefits.

Don’t know how, I always feel things are in the wrong direction. There are no perfect, but don’t be fooled to recognize the flaw to “nothing special” even goal.

I am not a stable and overconfident person, so I choose this art form that most close the art itself.

a performance artist who making performance art to oppose:

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/QPmZqmzm6n9TlSwSGwrjnQ

About this work

inspire by the over toasted popcorn, I find the texture of toasted papers have the temperaments I want

However, when I experienced toasting some paper with my oven, they fired. I was shocked that quickly poured some water on them. Then I just directly fire some paper instead.

preparing coals

About the performance

The main part of my work is me in that place with the audience so my experiment is about the training and experiments I had on the body, dancing, and most importantly, improvisation with all the exploration of silence, but I forget to record. I spend time preparing myself for the work.

A small piece of improvisation in class

the three notes about silence to put in the performance

1: in here

https://my.moonshotacademy.cn/alecea-li/2022/01/16/in-silence/

2:

https://my.moonshotacademy.cn/alecea-li/2022/01/16/shhhhh-the-lion-is-coming-about-fire/

3:

Shhhhh, the lion is coming (about fire)

With this sound (just click it and start to read)

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV16s411z7QT/?spm_id_from=333.788.recommend_more_video.1

Shhhhh

“Don’t you want your life! It’s coming!”

“But what? I can’t see anything, even things I should see. No stars, no moon.”

“Close your eye and see. Light will light the darkness, for always.”

Hmm……

Longly exhaled, his eyelashes slapped and slapped, facing more daze than a trembled innocent fawn, and finally calmed them in this impending destiny. No stars, no moon, no white light to see. 

The world spun and the darkness wobbled; it swallowed all sights as what pride a human.

“Yuh, brother!” He felt like a snake had sneaked into his pants, too fast and cold to know which trouser leg it had come in; his mind yelled to him: then it will slip on his skin and bite his golden fruit.  

“Shhhh, calm down and see! It’s coming! Don’t you know that?”

“But, but……”

Almost flooding out, those bitter coldness was suddenly paused then delivered away. His brother placed his index finger on his lips, and it was so warm and firm. 

“See, Ashla ”, He murmured, “ Open your real eyes to see!”

“When the sun has gone and the moon has rest, the world begins its breath, before lives live and after lives sleep. You listen, carefully but not concentrate, unintentionally but not thoughtlessly. It is there—— everywhere. ”

qrf