Documentary in Motion: Dramaturgy of the Corporeal in Chinese Dance Artist Wen Hui's Works

In 2015, Chinese dance artist Wen Hui.. (b. 1960) premiered her latest work Hong (. Red), taking one Cultural Revolution yangban xi (... Model Theatre), the ballet Hongse niangzi jun (... The Red Detachment of Women, 1964), as a highly influential political-aesthetic piece through which she confronts and reflects on its disciplinary power and lasting influence. Consciously framed as "documentary theatre," Red operates in fact along the line of her existing body of works that foreground engagement with social reality and involve methods that already overlap with those of "documentary theatre." I review and place Wen's works in dialogue with discourses of documentary theatre, focusing on three of her significant works: Shengyu baogao (... Report on Giving Birth, 1999), Huiyi (.. Memory, 2008), and Hong (. Red, 2015). My discussion sheds light on dimensions that expand current theorizations of documentary theatre into what I propose to think in terms of "dramaturgy of the corporeal," as it ponders their ramification in the Chinese context and proffers a glimpse of independent, interdisciplinary theatre-making in China. Chiayi Seetoo is an associate professor at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley and has published articles in P[art]icipatory Urbanisms, PAR: Performing Arts Review, TDR: The Drama Review, LEAP, The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, and Theatre Journal. Her research interests include critical studies of dance, physical performance, intercultural and interdisciplinary performance, improvisation, documentary theatre, and Asian and Sinophone cultural studies. Beyond her teaching and scholarship, she also performs, directs, and organizes artistic projects and community events that connect theory and practice.