The topic of Saturday night’s Caochangdi dance performance, the Chinese Great Famine of 1959-1961, is a brutally painful history. 36 million people starved to death in the countryside, villages were emptied, thousands turned in desperation to cannibalism, officials beat those who resisted or tried to send letters detailing their situation and asking for help, the list of horrors goes on. Unbelievably, while all of this occurred, the party’s granaries were full, and China continued to export grain abroad. Though the party still denies it today, the famine was the result of disastrous and incomprehensibly callous government policy.

Given this history, I was surprised by how apolitical much of the performance was. Though at times it was difficult to read the subtitles, from what I did read the interviews seemed to deal more with the everyday, human suffering inflicted by the famine than with the policies and the actions that caused it. The dances, likewise, seemed more concerned with individual experience than with institutional actions and their consequences. I wonder why this is. The documentarians wanted their work to shed light on the experiences of the Chinese people in the famine, so one possibility is that they were simply more concerned with getting these personal stories than with explaining political circumstances. Maybe, because the topic is still taboo in China today, it was simply too risky to ask people those sorts of questions – maybe they didn’t feel it was appropriate to put their interview subjects in a position where they had to confront them. At any rate, what stands out in my recollection of the performance is the emotional weight. It’s hard to feel that weight when you speak about tragedy in historical terms. By going to those who had lived through the famine and by incorporating their memories into the performance, the artists perhaps brought the audience a little closer.