The Art of Well-Being: A Workshop on Healing and Transformation

From 13 October to 15 October, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) invites Dutch choreographers Dr. Marloes van Houten and Rosa Allessie to host a series of workshops focusing on body, spiritual healing, and transfomation. In these series of workshops partcipants will learn to utilized the Life/Art Process, invented by the choreographers, along with dance and expressive arts therapy pioneers Anna and Daria Halprin, who founded the Tamalpa Institute in California in 1978. They employ a movement-based approach, whereby somatic psychology, visual art-making, poetry, dance, and performance art are joined together to facilitate the Life/Art Process that promotes embodied healing and transformation. The approach can be used in therapeutic trajectories as a well as to deepen choreographic and performance processes.

Themed around “reinventing home,” this workshop series attempts to take the concept of “home” into question. What is “home”? Is it needed to deconstruct and reconstruct to create a place/space/body known as home? How can one sustain a place that feels like home? Participants will learn to use movement, dance, as well as collage-making, poetry, and vocalization to discover what it means “to be at home,” and how we can sustain this place and feeling while living in a bustling city like Beiijng.

Deep Fall Puppet

This performance is in conjunction with the exhibition “Cold Nights” in UCCA’s Central Gallery, which is inspired by modern Chinese writer Ba Jin’s eponymous 1947 novel. Curated by Boliang Shen and Zhanglun Dai, the exhibition explores the performativity of creative acts, and the potential of artistic collaboration in times of precariousness and disillusionment.

Two female Dutch choreographers and dancers, Marloes van Houten and Rosa Allessie, have been invited to merge their bodies with the world of Ba Jin’s novel. In their choreographic response to the “Cold Nights” exhibition, they explore the subjectivity of the protagonists. They inhabit and reflect on the struggle between manipulation, love, jealousy, modernism, and conservatism. The dancers start as sculptures that gradually come to life, allowing the the dance, their relationships, and the narrative to unfold.

The exhibition, as well as the choreography of Marloes van Houten and Rosa Allessie, are both the artists’ response to their fictional personae and their collective reflection on current reality. The overlap and mixture of these responses construct a new space, a new text.

10.13（Fri）19:00-22:00 Workshops#1

10.14（Sat）9:00-12:00 Workshops#2

10.15（Sun）9:00-12:00 Workshops#3

10.17（Tue）14:00-14:15 Performance#1

10.17（Tue）15:00-15:15 Performance#2

10.17（Tue）16:00-16:15 Performance#3

Ticketing:

Workshops：

Single Ticket: 300 RMB/ Adult

Single Ticket: 260 RMB/ UCCA Member

Set Ticket: 800 RMB/ 3 Workshops/ Adult

Set Ticket: 650 RMB/ 3 Workshops/ UCCA Member

Performance:

Adult/General Visitor:

Free, exhibition ticket required

Workshop, UCCA and Inside-out Theater member:

Free, exhibition ticket not required

Note：

*Enjoy UCCA Member ticket prices with the purchase of a yearly membership card (RMB 300);

*Collect your ticket from reception 30 minutes before the event begins;

*Please no late entry;

*Seating is limited, and tickets must be collected individually;

*Please keep mobile devices on silent.

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