Recently, Chinese contemporary dance works have often appeared in front of Taiwanese audiences. This year alone, we have seen Tao Dance Theater's "6" and "7", which combine physical space with time, revealing minimalism yet arousing impulses. Yang Zhen's "Ethnic Minorities" took a sample from ethnic dance, reflecting on the ruling class and the collective subconscious of people's desire to strive, and depicted cross-ethnic body communication with humor and sensibility. In a rapidly changing China, dance has become a form of individual creation and expression, rather than a tool of government propaganda as it was half a century ago. In 1987, Guangdong Dance School opened a four-year contemporary dance program, and contemporary dance officially entered China's higher education system. Since then, a large number of dancers and choreographers from academies have emerged.

Gu Jiani, choreographer of “Exit”, was born in 1988 in Sichuan. Professionally trained in both ballet and Chinese classical dance, Gu joined Beijing Modern Dance Company after graduating from university. She began creating her own works since 2012. Her latest works are coordinated by Ping Pong Production, who is active in both China and the United States, and also promotes Tao' Dance Theater around the world. “Exit”, co-produced by Taiwan National Performing Arts Center—National Theater & Concert Hall, and the 18th Shanghai International Arts Festival “Raw” Program, premiered at Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art Theater in October 2016. In this performance in Taiwan, the original dancer Li Nan who appeared in the trailer was replaced by Lei Yan, former dancer of Tao Dance Theater.

Walking into the theater, Wang Xuanqi carries Lei Yan on her shoulder and places him upside down in the pile of pillows. Lei's legs bend in the air looking like withered branches in winter, while Gu Jiani turns over from behind the gray wall and sits on the wall watching. Wang Xuanqi falls straight to the front and stands upside down with his right shoulder. Brave and apathetic, with extraordinary muscle strength and techniques, that was my first impression of the three dancers. The tall, gray, L-shaped walls are airtight, and the buckwheat-filled, seven-kilogram white pillows are stacked neatly against the walls or scattered in clumps. All of a sudden, the alarm goes off and the chairless auditorium steps vibrate as if they have motors installed underneath. I was afraid that the whole theater would explode. On the stage, the lights flash out and dancers begin running rapidly, tossing pillows around. The heavy pillows fall straight to the ground, without flying or sliding afar. The heavy objects are in strong contrast to the dancers’ extremely flexible bodies, and the anxiety brought by the intense noise in the air and the vibration of the seats exists not only in my brain, but also in my sweaty palms and slightly numb back.

Gu pulls herself up from a single shoulder handstand position, with Lei and Wang using this motive, Gu is pulled back and force like a tumbler, showing great muscle strength. When standing, Gu swings her hands horizontally, cutting edges and corners of the space, and with the push of Lei and Wang, a dazzling wind is formed, causing each other to spin rapidly. While Gu and Wang both stand on their arms and heads to create the opening scene of withered branches, Lei begins carrying several pillows at a time, stacking them in a checkerboard pattern on the ground with unidentifiable logic, which looks like silence but is created by a lot of effort.

Since previous work “Right & Left”, Gu Jiani and Li Nan have tried to interact with everyday objects, using iron benches and long tables that can be pushed back and forth with support in unusual positions. "Exit" is even more exciting and dangerous with unusually heavy pillows and a single ladder with too long intervals. I was on edge in the first row of seats and I could feel the wind blowing as Wang Xuanqi pulled down the single ladder from the wall and hung it around her necks spinning, or when Lei stepped on the ladder raised by Wang and Gu, and crept up and down, until at last she grasped the ladder by her neck and was dragged into space. With the neck being the supporter and the knee joints relaxed, dancers lean forward and backward, and the neck throws, catches, drags, spins, and this almost becomes the symbolic movement of dance. If we consider the body structure, the neck is the least covered of the whole spine, nerves and the respiratory system go through it, making it vulnerable to injuries and diseases. Touching the neck can be intimate (or offensive), and massaging it can be relaxing and disarming. Gu Jiani seems to deliberately strip away the cultural implications of the neck itself and considers it merely as a physical supporter, yet during the dance, such images constantly hit the audience. It reminds me of 2017 “new artist new vision” Huang Yufen's dance "The Place of Silence", in which the killing image is developed by strangling. “Exit” uses only physical nature of the body and everyday objects to develop the main axis of movement, but produces startling images that drag me into the darkness of life, the intense and continuous change, and the breathless interpersonal relationships.

Perhaps, as Gu Jiani said, the creating process is to spend half a year in the rehearsal ground to explore and grind the work. The extraordinary effect of the dance requires not only great female muscle strength and precise choreography, but also a sense of crisis created in the theater, and the continuous and unstoppable events force the audience to receive a sense of anxiety, connecting the surreal dance developed from daily objects with everyday life, which dynamically interacts with the current society. As cultural historian Harvie Ferguson puts it: "The only constant in modernity is the tendency to movement, its permanent signature." The changing modernity reflected by “Exit” is that the body is always on the run, and the physical strength is gradually overdrawn. Every creation is followed by destruction, and the physical law of action and reaction is a cycle of cause and effect that cannot be stopped.

Andre Lepecki, an American dance scholar, once proposed the philosophy of body as a creative concept, which is not only an independent and closed entity, but also an open and dynamic exchange system. Perhaps it is more interesting to think about the body scenery carried out by Untitled Group from this perspective. When events occur in a dance performance, it creates an imminent tension among performers, and between performers and the audience, and the stagnation and suspension of bodies arouse an existing sense of time. Falling into temporality (Heidegger's "Verfallen"), is an appropriate description of the dynamic nature of "Exit", during which the bodies exhaust in an hour’s dance. With daily objects in the dance, the law of movements intended for manipulating objects has developed into physical techniques beyond experience. Dancers move through space, expending energy over time, bonding with the breathless audience. 

photo by tasu