Event
Li-E Chen: Proposition for Making a Silent Opera at an Invisible Museum
07 Oct 2017
Southbank Centre
London, United Kingdom
-
Photo by Li-E Chen.
Workshop
Li-E Chen: Thinking Posture
7 Oct 2017
Event times
Approximate run time: 240 mins
1:00PM - 5:00PM
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- Belvedere Road
- London
- SE1 8XX
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Tube: Waterloo / Embankment
Event map
Li-E Chen would like to invite you to her upcoming participatory event, 'Thinking Posture' at the Royal Festival Hall (Level 2 Green Side Foyers), Southbank Centre as part of China Changing Festival on 7 October 2017 (1pm– 5pm).
About
Thinking Posture and its Chinese characters together express the idea and the aesthetics behind Chen’s R&D Silent Opera.You will be introduced to four Chinese characters: 思想姿态 [Sī Xiǎng Zī Tài] and speak the characters in Mandarin Chinese and to write them with chalk on brown paper rolls. These characters translate as ‘thinking posture’, Li-E Chen’s term for the disposition of mind and body that governs one’s ways of thinking, living, and artistic-making. She invites you to question what your own ‘thinking posture’ is by learning to write and speak the characters.
思 [Sī]: to think, thought (involving mind with heart)
想 [Xiǎng]: to think, thought (involving mind and eyes with heart)
姿 [Zī]: posture (having a feminine form)
态 [Tài]: state or condition (with heart)
"'Give me a body then': this is the formula of philosophical reversal. The body is no longer the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to reach the unthought, that is life.... Life will no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown into the categories of life. The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of the body, its postures. 'We do not even know what a body can do': in its sleep, in its drunkenness, in its efforts and resistances. To think is to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its postures." Gilles Deleuze
This experiment is taking place in parallel with a separate event, Proposition for Making a Silent Opera at an Invisible Museum in the Funtion Room of Royal Festival Hall at Level 3.
Thinking Posture and its Chinese characters together express the idea and the aesthetics behind Chen’s R&D Silent Opera. With Special Thanks to Arts Council England, Southbank Centre, Tête à Tête Opera Festival, Live Art Development Agency, Devoted and Disgruntled UK, Contemporary Political Theory Research Group, Royal Holloway, University of London, and all the participants and advisers who supported in Li-E Chen’s one-year research and development of opera project on the life and art of Tehching Hsieh 2017 – 2018.
