There is a whole history of dancing as a competitive game, from the early ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ to the popular ‘Just Dance’, where a machine is quantifying and then evaluating players’ moves. The physical involvement of the player and the use of memory to store the sequence of moves is what dance has always been about. In Future Dance of Nostalgia, Kexin Hao develops a dancing game where players have to re-enact the movements of ‘pre-industrial, heavy physical labour, and work songs’. The body becomes then a place for memory, where the re-enacted movements preserve an important and easily forgotten social history. Commissioned by iii, the work performs public gestures, and the performance enables mechanisms close to oral culture, mediating and personally recording information, to be shared in the future.

 

Kexin Hao – Future Dance of Nostalgia