Studies: A Dance Cycle 临摹
Since 2016, Studies has been using writing and choreography to research bodies in the Chinese Qigong fever of the early post-Mao era. Through close study of an archival photograph of practitioners in 1980s Beijing, Studies approaches Qigong as an alternative form of demonstration that provides an interface for individuals to exercise their bodies in public space as a last resort for the momentarily ungoverned—an impossible, ungainly, precarious position that begs the question: What kind of body can we possibly cultivate other than the one that stands alone, stiff, in opposition, immobile? What craft is our craft that allows us to exist while protesting a political reality, which is not just an event but also a transformative apparatus?
Studies: A Site-Specific Dance
Studies: A Dance Cycle provokes and captures negotiations between the individual and the public in different settings, from urban hacking to site-specific responses to various urban locations in New York including a Long Island Rail Road station in Brooklyn, the Westinghouse Time Capsule in Flushing Meadows Park, the streets and roofs of East Village as well as contemporary dance and performance venues such as Judson Church.
Conceived and choreographed by Tingying Ma
Dramaturg: Kang Kang
Performance: Tina Wang
Photography and videography: Maya Yu Zhang, Karolina Majewska, Melanie Elbaz, Taole Zhu, Qingshan Wang
Studies #1 Impossible to Cool Down
May 2016, Nostrand LIRR Station, Brooklyn, New York. [Video]
Studies #2 Walking on Walls, Flying on Roofs
August 2016, 1144 Bergen Performance Art Habitat, Brooklyn, New York.
Studies #3 Yi
May 21, 2017, ITINERANT Performance Art Festival NYC, Flushing Meadows Park, New York. [Video] [Review on Hyperallergic]
Studies #4 Inside Out
August 20, 2017, The Current Sessions: Volume VII // On Resistance at Wild Project, New York. [Video]
Studies #5 Landscape of Knowing
October 2, 2017, Movement Research at Judson Church, New York. [Video]
Studies#6 I am the Ultra Hygiene
December 14, 2017 - January 27, 2018, Roadside Picnic: The Zone, curated by Hiroshi Sunairi and Sam Yixin Gong. Chambers Fine Art, New York.
Studies #6 I am the Ultra Hygiene v.2
January 25-26, 2018, Chez Bushwick & Panoply Performance Lab.
Studies: Three Hypotheses
May 15, 2018, The Dixon Place, New York [Video]
Choreography: Tingying Ma
Dramaturg: Kang Kang
Sculpture: Jessica Lin
Performance: Jessica Lam, Fumihiro Kikuchi, and Jiyon Song
Studies: A Power Induced Lecture
June 10, 2018, Museum of Chinese in America, New York.
Continuing our choreographic research, this iteration of Studies presents an anti-lecture performance that recreates the form of a “power-induced-lecture” (带功报告), a form of mass teaching and public assembly mobilized unprecedented numbers of amateurs and practitioners in the height of the Qigong fever in the 1980s-90s that swept over Reform-era China. Informed by archival research, the performance uses physical and discursive reenactment to activate the Qigong archive as an illicit system of knowledge and communication, where the Qi acts as an unreliable medium in collective processes of bodily, spiritual, and cognitive mediation in the absence of the Qigong master.
Director: Tingying Ma
Dramaturg: Kang Kang
Performance: Quan Xiao, Zheng Huize, Wang Yifan, Fumihito Kikuchi, Jessica Lam
Design: Dandan Yang
Text: Kang Kang, Xu Chuan
Photography and videography: Maya Yu Zhang, Samuel Budin
Studies: A Meeting of Qi 临摹：气的故事
September 25, 2018, The Institute for Provocation, Beijing
Future Host invites friends and neighbors to join us in a rehearsal, reading, and reenactment of a power-induced lecture. Under the harvest moon, we briefly inhabit artist Wang Jun’s exhibition Three Days and Nights to invoke anonymous memories of the city.
Director: Tingying Ma
Dramaturg: Kang Kang
Guests: Huang Banyi, Chen Dali, Wan Huashan, Dakota Guo, and more
Photography: Qinrui Hua
Studies: Obliteration 临摹：湮没 (2022)
Single-channel video, 16mm film, 8’42”
The latest iteration of the dance cycle, this film explores the idea of qi and its bodily expression. Qi could be interpreted as breath, force, air, or an opaque, fluid system of knowledge and communication. The work captures qi and its ubiquitous and cryptic quality by attending to prelinguistic and nonverbal communications in sound, movement, and image. Responding to Audrey Chen and Doron Sadja’s sound piece AB cut 7, which performed with a synthesizer and extended vocal techniques, the choreographic movements evoke gestural, skeletal, and muscular tensions around the torso, belly, and throat. With contractions and expansions in breathing, the dancer negotiates the interior and the exteriority, embodiment and transcendence, remembrance and forgetting through structured improvisation. The specificity of 16mm film marks movements as cyclical, analogous to the replenishment and exhaustion of breath, the waxing and waning of energy.
Bodily Reaction: Vitalizing the Bare Life 应激之机. Curated by Qianxi Liu and Wang Hongzhe. March 2 – June 4, 2023, Taikang Space, Beijing.
[Ocula review]
OTHER EXHIBITIONS
Force Majeure. Curated by Lu Mingjun. January 18 – March 18, 2020, Eli Klein Gallery, New York. [Ocula review]
To Speculate, Of Nature. Curated by Winnie Wong. May 17 – June 21, 2019, NanHai Art, San Francisco.
WRITINGS
“疫情来信：不能裁决的生命” [Pandemic Correspondence: Unadjudicated Life] LEAP, February 2020. [in Chinese]
“Can the Subaltern Perform?” Ritual and Capital. New York: Bard Graduate Center and Wendy's Subway, 2021.