China: Gu Jiani's Exit

Gu's affection for objects can be seen in most of her touring choreography Right & Left(2013), Exit (2016) and TRANSITION (2021), where objects are used as the dominant performative elements. Recognising the powerful language sited in objects, Gu used white pillows (weighing seven kilograms each) and a long ladder as the significant stage objects in her female trio Exit. The pillows are either scattered or neatly stacked around the grey wall as an artistic component of the set design in the opening scene.This display component helps to extend the imagery of the audience when the pillows are used to hide the body parts of the dancers. For example, a pair of upside-down legs (the pillow was covering the dancer's torso and the head) created an image of winter withered branches or the components of a dead tree.

Apart from the display function, Gu is specifically interested in extending the dance vocabulary based on the substance of the pillows and the ladder. Following postmodern and contemporary dance choreographers' footsteps searching for object-inspired movement, the pillows and ladders form a labouring body in Exit. Nevertheless, Gu is looking for virtuosic movement rather than everyday movement. Merleau-Ponty (1962) pointed out that "it is by taking things as our starting point that our hands, eyes, and all our sense-organs appear to us as so many interchangeable instruments". Gu's exploration with the objects is to first feel and move with it and later discover how a female body works, interrelates, and coordinates with the things that constitute a two-way dependence between the dancers' bodies and objects. In Exit, by repeating the actions of arranging and demolishing the neat arrangement of the pillows, as well as unsuccessful tossing and throwing off the heavy pillows -- which is unachievable due to the objects' heavyweight - - Gu kept alluding to the body in construction, a body that challenges physicality yet reveals the vulnerability of the human. As a result, the dancers skilfully performed the passing of the flying and falling pillows with speedy slide, swing, toss, leap, roll, off-balance, collapse, and hit. It was an intense choreography that made the audience hold their breath and worry about the unpredictability of this supercharged pass-the-parcel game. The weighty and immobile pillows somehow contrast the dancers' mobility and skill in negotiating their weight-transfers in this competing-like movement quality.

Incorporating the ladder in the movement execution elevates the risk-taking of the performance as the dancers' neck is used for manipulation. Hanging the ladder around their neck, the dancers buckled the ladder and dragged the ladder into the space. Besides climbing up and drilling down on the single ladder (the everyday functionality), the dancers' slide, swing, and spin the ladder. In addition, they used the ladder to support the dancers' weight, sometimes hanging and suspending them and letting them fall. Gu also extended this virtuosic moment by replacing the ladder and pillows with the dancers bodies and performed fast-paced manipulation. Instead of interacting with the objects, the dancers pushed, pulled, supported, and controlled each other. All these fast-paced interactions between the physical properties of the body and ordinary objects created tension and anxiety for the viewer, as what Wang (2017) claimed as "a strong sense of crisis in the theatre". Wang referred to this physical exhaustion and strength as the changing modernity where destruction repeatedly comes after creation, just like the arranging and demolishing pillow game that never ends.

When it comes to choosing a movement style to interact with objects, ErGao and Gu offer two distinct aesthetic preferences. EiGao is interested in the minimal and subtle interaction with the objects in Kung He Fat Choy. He attends to the ordinary function, referentiality and signification of the objects. In contrast. Gu shows aggressiveness in manipulating the objects and the dancers. Using pillows and ladder as a starting point.Gu turned this physical skill beyond the daily experience. She extended the necessity between the dancers' movement in working, interrelating and coordinating with the objects to a highly technical movement style either with or without the objects. In Gu's Exit, objects serve as the inspiration for movement development not only for everyday interactions but, more importantly, for explosive athleticism.