Pamela Yau

Graceful movements and dance has long been used to emphasize the beauty of women's bodies. But leave it up to the Living Dance Studio, China's only independent dance company, to turn this concept on its head with its multimedia and interpretative dance entitled Report On The Body, performed at Queen Elizabeth Hall during the Lift 2008 Festival on July 4^th.

Report examines contemporary life in China on every level from sex to money to dreams of people through the movements and viewing of women's bodies. The female form is used by the company as a force to invoke thoughts and emotions about everyday life in this country that has undergone many changes, politically, economically, and socially in recent years, leaving China to discover its emerging identity and place in the global society. 

The interactive multimedia nature of the performance, the company's trademark, is evident even before the performers enter the auditorium. Cameras placed throughout Queen Elizabeth Hall pick up visuals of people moving throughout the hall, as unsuspecting members of the audience find themselves projected onto the large screen on stage for all to view.

With the live footage on the screen, the audience can track the dancers as they make their way through QEH, into the auditorium, and eventually onto the stage. Each of the performers, both male and female, enter wearing padding that exaggerates the seeming assets of the female form as they are crowded together, side-by-side, in a tumor-like mass.

While they make their way through the auditorium, they wander through the stalls, waving, pointing and interacting with the audience, but most importantly staying as a collective mass and being. Only when they reach the stage do they separate and begin to interact with the projections of the live footage, which eventually makes way during the performance for computer displays and film of video artist Jiang Zhi's work Laugh is Very Important.

Report itself develops on two levels, both audio-visually and through movement and dance, which serves as the company's primary way of displaying the female body as representative of daily life. One notable example is the communal act of bathing in the past in China, as displayed in the dancers rhythmically dipping their feet into buckets of water in one part of the production.

As the performers combine sharp and even wild flailing at times with more subtle and poignant movements, they are able to showcase the spectrum of emotion and struggle through their actions and interactions with props.  At various points of Report, the performers were pulled off stage by a hook and fishing pole as if rag dolls and end up fighting over objects hung from this pole like an animal, such as an apple. However, it is articles of clothing which make for the most intriguing props in the performance with the dancers interactions with them.

Featured at several points of the performance, qipaos, long dresses traditionally worn by women in China, are use to provoke the audience to examine how this piece of clothing has been used to define Chinese beauty and the body of Chinese women.

At different points of the production, this Chinese dress is used to a comic degree with the performers dressed as large oversized qipaos being dragged onstage.  A woman wearing a qipao, which length stretches across the stage, also ends up having two men crawl up her skirt while she sits back and chats on the phone with a friend.

Women's bodies, be it seemingly eaten on screen like an apple or displayed in beautiful qipaos, the Living Dance Studio are able to use it to encapsulate the world around them and the changing nature of China through a Report on the Body.