Five Questions with WomanFishMan
WomanFishMan is a moving image project that imagines choreographer Victoria Chiu as the historical landing site of her grandfather’s journey from his home, the fishing village of Chiuchow in the Guangdong province of China.
In collaboration with video artists RDYSTDY (Hana Miller & Jacob Perkins), the contemporary body crosses time and place in a visual process of questioning and creating new possibilities.
View it every night of December, as part of Mapping Melbourne.
We spoke to Victoria Chiu and Hana Miller about the processes involved in creating WomanFishMan.
Victoria Chiu by Maylei Hunt.
How did WomanFishMan come about?
Victoria: WomanFishMan has come about from influences and experimentation, which have developed over several different projects. One strong thought process goes back to working on site in Shanghai on a work called, ‘What Happened In Shanghai’. I was working with Aussie and Shanghai artists, on site and from personal histories and I was being exposed to some amazing stories and places associated with those stories. I wanted to not only keep those moments in the work, but I wanted to document them as well. I wished for my process to have a strong video element and documentation alongside it.
Serendipity led me to meeting Hana Miller, who was exactly the right person I needed to meet at that time. We began collaborating, with ideas first, then the ideas led to some small developments. Recently we have completed a massive first instalment of live dance/multimedia work dealing with personal history and projection called, Genetrix. We have also been talking about a much larger project, working title The Hide… this will really bring our ideas together once we can really sink our teeth into it. The film WomanFishMan, is a step between Genetrix and The Hide. It is all film, it is heavily influenced by the work I did in Genetrix, but is interpreting itself entirely through film. It is an interesting moment for me to take the live body out of the experience. I am also really happy that the film could be made for Mapping Melbourne, a festival I love every year, run by Multlicultural Arts Victoria.
Hana: Victoria was really interested in her connection with her grandfather, who came from Chiuchow, a small fishing village in the Guangdong province of China, and who lived with her as a child in Australia. There are many interesting stories in the trajectory of his life and how it has effected hers, and it is loaded with nuanced themes of gender, naming, geopolitics, superstition. It's the story of diaspora in a nutshell. A peanut shell! (There are 90kg of peanuts used as set and prop pieces in the choreography). So, WomanFishMan is about Victoria and her grandfather, as seen by Victoria. For the context of Mapping Melbourne, and projecting on the Chin Chin Wall of Art, the film combines documentation of the choreographic process, and moving images made with archival family photographs and keepsakes.
How did you two meet?
Victoria: I met Hana through a mutual friend’s kids’ party. It was pure luck. We had a lot of discussions, a lot of coffees, we started writing ideas on file share sites… so we were working together on writing the ideas out. Slowly we distilled our thoughts and found details needed for each project. We found there wasn’t one project. To get to a certain point, a project that was really ambitious, we needed to take a pathway through different types of experimentation and testing of ideas.
It was great feeling and seeing these ideas coming to fruition in the intense development of Genetrix. This is just the beginning. Those ideas will create a base for our film WomanFishMan and then we will continue developing them.
It was quite amazing that, after all the thinking, talking and writing, when we work it seems to come together naturally. The process is enjoyable. It makes sense to us and we understand when each of our skills are needed and how to listen to the other to make the work the best it can be. I think there is also an intuitive process at work, which can happen because we’ve done the foundation work together.
Hana: We met at a slip n' slide party in the park and quickly discovered that we shared interests in our work and quite fluid processes in the way we worked. As Victoria mentioned above, together we have our mind set on an ambitious project where site-specific choreography generates an entirely new hybrid site, or a contemporary "place," built through multimedia installation. So this is all a part of that process.
In choosing choreography to depict this journey, you move your body to literally embody that of your ancestor; what was in this choice? In this parallel, do you ask your audience to be aware of migrants as embodied subjects, rather than, say, as prisoners?
Victoria: That’s a very interesting concept. No, I wasn’t considering the migrant an embodied subject in contrast to a prisoner who has no autonomy over their body, a prisoner’s body in limbo would be a frightening body to channel. The embodying was necessary to connect. Only two generations separate me from my grandfather but there is so much unknown, so much lost. There is a lot known, through my own life experiences crossing with his, also through other people’s stories of him (and since he his death) through memorabilia and history collected about him and places/eras he spent time in – but there are many gaps too. Embodying him allows me to free myself from myself and plunge deeper into a world I don’t know, I have the information that gives me parameters, I have also chosen to believe certain things that shape the experience, but I can find unpredictable moments when giving in wholly to this process. There are sections when I am embodying him and other moments I have found other ways to use his influence. The parts when embodying are surprising for me.
In using video to then capture the choreography, this shifts the experience into something that can be iterated infinitely, unlike your grandfather’s own journey; why bring the two together?
Hana: Video can really isolate parts of movement or choreography. You get perspectives, actual lines of sight, that you couldn't get as an audience in a performance. It's quite a privileged position, and when this is taken into consideration by a performer in front of a camera, there's a bit of tension in acknowledging how the framing effects the choreography. You can choreograph for the lens's specific perspective, or choreograph the camera, or work to some combination of both. For this project, the camera definitely had a say in Victoria's choreography, but it also gave her the possibility of playing with some ideas that might not have worked in a live performance context. We were also thinking of the projection outcome, being outdoors in a public space, or seen through the window of a busy restaurant. The viewing experience is likely to be pretty fragmented, and we couldn't rely on anyone sitting to watch a whole narrative play out. On the other hand, the video will play on a loop. The repetition of images and editing helps to familiarise a viewer with the world and logic of the video, easing you into the abstraction, which is very much like an internal process, like memory, or association. Since we don't really have access to Victoria's grandfather's journey, the format is quite accurate to the process of piecing together someone else's personal history, with moments of relating, interpreting, and a whole lot of making up meaning from a very specific position in time.
What will you be seeing at Mapping Melbourne 2019?
Victoria: I will be at the opening event... It’s going to be hard to see everything I want to… but I aim to see everything I can in Community Day – Comic Sans/Forbidden Laughter/BELON by P7, I’d also like to see the Double Bill @ The Toff with my friend from Shanghai Ma Haiping, Jonathan Homsey Shujin and Weave Movement and Yumi’s Wanna Be A Rabbit
Hana: So many things look so great! I'm really interested in seeing Ana Muslim, as my mother's side of the family is Indonesian, and I spent most of my childhood there.