I didn’t know what I was expecting from the Caochangdi Workstation performance, but it most assuredly wasn’t the performance I encountered.

The performance began without introduction. The stage was shrouded in darkness–anticipation crackled in the air, palpable and tense. Then, a film began to roll.

This first performance was a dialogue between a mother and daughter–the mother, recorded on film, and the daughter performing on stage. The mother described her painful birth experience; the daughter described how her mother once made her write a “self-criticism” letter. As the performance progressed, the daughter writes her “self-criticism” letter to her mother, repeating over and over how sorry she is for talking to a boy and that she will study harder and won’t make the mistake again. She roughly scrawls her self-criticism letter in red inked Chinese characters all over her body, voice pitching higher and higher into hysteria until–silence. The room was so quiet, as if no one dared to breathe lest they pain the performer any more. This is when I realized that the performance wasn’t about the daughter being upset about her mother punishing her. This was the performer as an adult, trying to convey to her mother how sorry their relationship has deteriorated. How sorry she is that their communication has been lost. She used the medium of her 15 year old self to convey her pain until she leaves the stage in a swatch of red light, leaving a sense of unresolved sorrow and a wistful nostalgia for the relationship that had been.

The performance was masterfully done–her interpretive dance, as well as the cadence of her speech, combined with the minimalist English subtitles strongly evoked emotion from the audience. I can’t say I enjoyed the rest of the performances quite as much.

The rest of the performance was confusing. Interpretive dance sequences and short monologues were interspersed with documentary clips on the Great Famine, which plagued China from 1959-1961. These clips were fascinating, organic pieces which showed the performers interviewing old villagers in their own hometowns who survived the famine. The combination of standard Mandarin Chinese from the younger performers and the rural dialects of the villagers provided an interesting contrast between the modern world and the old–though admittedly 1960 was not long ago. While these clips provided a fantastic, first hand account of the famines and the culture of the villages, the interpretive dances were harder to understand. I’m probably just bad at understanding performance art, but I had a very hard time trying to understand the message they were so clearly trying to convey. The dances, while interesting, at times pulled away from the core of the performance, which I thought was the interviews with the villagers. In comparison to the first dance which enhanced the message and comprised most of the performance, these interpretive dances were difficult for me to understand and left me confused and my brain tired from trying to make sense of it all. I would have liked to see more interaction from the documentaries.

I left the performance feeling slightly dissatisfied, but I can’t say I’m sorry I went.