Please dance happily and freely 欢乐地跳吧
Multimedia installation comprising dual-channel video,
spatialized audio, and interactive choreographic environments
22′59″
spatialized audio, and interactive choreographic environments
22′59″
Please Dance Happily and Freely is a multimedia installation and choreographic research project that examines how female bodies are choreographed, conditioned, and reimagined within structured systems. Rooted in a long-term mother-daughter practice, the work unfolds across public dancing squares and migrant neighborhoods, tracing two parallel choreographic paths. Here, dance becomes a shared language—one that traverses silence, borders, and histories.
At the heart of the project lies the Dap—a wooden frame drum of bone and skin. Once it carried divine rhythms—alive, unwritten. Then it was pinned down, inscribed, and reproduced. Now it moves again, reconnecting bodies across the Eurasian continent, inviting them to remember what cannot be written.
The installation revolves around five rhythmic systems: examination choreography, radio calisthenics, staged ethnic performance, ritual whirling, and wedding improvisation. These rhythms shape how bodies move, remember, and relate—each carrying traces of discipline, joy, and ancestral memory.
Floor projections sketch shifting formations, guiding visitors through choreographic patterns. Wall texts appear as commands from an unseen choreographer. Whispered voice tracks drift through the space—private utterances between dancers, at once resistant and complicit. Within the fractures of imposed rhythms, fleeting moments of freedom may emerge. As a viewer, you witness how systems are embodied in movement. As a dance, you may disrupt, subvert, or reclaim the choreography placed upon your body.
Extending into a long-term participatory workshop, the artist invites women from diverse cultural backgrounds to explore these rhythmic vocabularies together. Within irregular beats, they search for unspoken gestures and dormant memories—rehearsing ways to unlearn, and to imagine new rhythms between the ones inherited.
“Please dance happily and freely” becomes both a cheerful command and a quiet provocation:
Whose rhythm do you dance to?
What does your body remember?