game plan

There are 18 participants in total on this trip, 9 from Europe and 9 from Asia, 6 musicians and 12 choreographers. I'm working together with (from left to right) choreographer Hartati from Indonesia, dancer/choreographer Tae-Sang and composer Young-Gyu from Korea, saxaphonist Athur Vidal from Spain/France and choreographer Ezio Schiavulli from Italy (not shown in the photo). Our group meets daily in the studios of the Chaoyang cultural center in Beijing. We have to prepare something for a public presentation in a few days time. We've been discussing for two days now: One thing is clear, we don't want to end up on stage making a modern dance interpretation of the Miao culture! Our experience has been so complex and interesting that we want to find a form that can best transmit this to a public.

We come up with a game plan for our part of the show. The details aren't clear yet, but we know for sure that we want to work with the whole of the theater including the entrance, lobby and auditorium. Rather than representing our experience on the stage the way the Miao were forced to represent their rituals as staged performances, we want to create an experience for ourselves and the public: a welcome and greeting ritual to initiate our visitors. We want to transform the theater, a space more familiar to our public than to us, into something strange and unfamiliar. We want to take it over for the space of the show and make it our 21st century village! We run though our idea with the other participants and they are enthusiastic - though convincing the project leaders proves more difficult . . . after many debates we are given the green light to develop the idea - we're looking forward to meeting our public in a few days time!