Reenactment in the Found Footage: Work-in-Progress

After having gathered sound memories of Southeast Asia in 2020, director Chiu Chih-Hua continued his co-creative research with dancers and performers in 2021. In this project that considerably drew inspiration from interviews collected in the previous year, Chiu maintained a high emphasis in physicality and action while referring constantly to archival research in photographs and moving images. 

“Reenactment in the Found Footage: Work-in-Progress” is a co-creative project that combines interviews and archival enquiries with a specific focus on films produced between 1945 and 1975. Chiu and his dancer collaborator Yang Ya-Chun were inspired by The Mountain (1966), the first Taiwan modernist documentary and later they attempted to characterize the visual interpretation of this Taiwanese work by relating it to a classic from the French New Wave, Far from Vietnam (1967). They integrated these films into their latest creation using analogue and digital devices while exploring the dialectical dynamism between performance and video arts, reenactment and montage. The inclusion of both analogue and digital technologies was intentional because for the director, it displays the stark contrast between the past and present and so makes us more imaginative about issues that happened a few decades ago. In the presentation, dancers were encouraged to interact mindfully with images projected onto four enormous screens. By relating physical movements to historical accounts and images full of ideological messages, the director hopes that dancers’ mindful interaction would inspire audiences to reflect upon the full spectrum of political responses, from the proactive resistance to apathetic indifference.