Talk by Prof. Yin Mei, “Artist, Body, and Rupture in Warped Time”

Join us in the ZSR Auditorium (Room 404) from 5:00-6:30 pm for a lecture by Prof. Yin Mei, CUNY-Queens College. This lecture examines how the artist’s body became a living archive during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a decade when ideology reorganized aesthetics, labor, and memory. Having grown up within the strict artistic regime that permitted only two revolutionary model ballets—The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women—I was formed as a dancer inside a system where the body was both an instrument of state narrative and site of political inscription.

Through three intersecting historical encounters, I investigate how rupture produces what I call warped time:

First, Nixon in China, which stages the 1972 diplomatic meeting between Mao Zedong and Richard Nixon. In 2012, I choreographed this opera at Théâtre du Châtelet, bringing embodied memories of performing The Red Detachment of Women into a Western operatic reconstruction of the same historical moment. Thirty years later, I returned those stories—once tightly controlled by ideology—back to the global stage.

Second, Chung Kuo Cina by Michelangelo Antonioni, filmed in China during the Cultural Revolution and subsequently banned. Antonioni documented the Red Flag Canal in Lin County, a monumental irrigation project constructed manually by workers and artists sent to “experience life.” I was among 400 performers from the Henan Song and Dance Company assigned to live and labor alongside those builders. The canal was framed domestically as a heroic collectivist triumph, yet Antonioni’s lens diverged from the image the state wished to project. Representation itself became rupture.

Drawing from Daoist cosmology, the I Ching, and Deleuze’s Body without Organs, I articulate my choreographic methodology, The Inner Technology of Knowing, as a somatic epistemology emerging from these historical fractures. My current project, Body in Warped Time, extends this inquiry, proposing the body as a dynamic technology for survival when official narratives collapse.

Through philosophical reflection, archival materials, and performance excerpts, this lecture situates the artist’s body as witness, sensor, and counter-memory—revealing how history persists not linearly, but through embodied recurrence.

Additional Events in the Series:

Half the Sky – Yin Mei Dance
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
7:30–8:30 pm
Brendle Recital Hall, Wake Forest University

“Wellness through Dance and Somatic Education”
Guest Lecture & Demonstration: Prof. Yin Mei, CUNY–Queens College
Thursday, April 2, 2026
5:00–6:00 pm
Benson 409