Introduction of the artist:

DU Yun (China)

Born in 1977, Shanghai, China. Lives and works in New York. Du Yun is a composer, musician and performance artist. Commissions include: Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Mann Center for the Performing Arts, Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, Festivals fur Neue Musik & aktuelle Kultur (Switzerland), the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), among others. Her installation-performance-video collaboration with visual artist Shahzia Sikander have exhibited at the Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum, the Tokyo Contemporary Museum of Art, San Francisco Art Institute, Pace Foundation (San Antonio) and Hong Kong Art Fair 2012; solo appearances at the National Academy of Museum (USA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Introduction of works:

Run is a simple shape perceived from two sides. On stage, two performers, the artist Du Yun and Claire Chase, embark on an elongated process that follows parallel trajectories: one, from an intimate space spilling into high voltage intensities; the other, its exact opposite – the mirror image, going backwards; high intensity dissolves into a stillness. At the core of rapidly increasing movement lies this stillness. The duelling dynamic of the two on-stage performers changes throughout the piece continuing to transform during and after, mutating along each trajectory. They present instantaneous disorientations and sudden abyssal faults that exist in ubiquitous routine.

Deconstructing the idea of a definitive performance, Du Yun invites the audience to undergo a visceral experience from which no one interpretation might be the ultimate result – while also offering the audience a more authoritative role. If the audience is the transmitter of the work, the performers act as the transducer and the composer provides the sound source, then who owns the authorship of the work? It offers an analytical listening in relation to the experience of the performance, in which it is as if one has been led into an enclosed space in total silence and stillness, and starts to run, as fast as possible. As the artist can see:

a beating heart
hot blood in the veins
moving through the air, with the feet arching over the earth
after a while
the motion and the stillness are inseparable
and incongruous
the presence of stillness
at the heart of movement
of repose at the heart of the race
of respect within transgression
the flying objects
the inseparable, you are the dead, the dead is you,
you feel the long-gone intimacy, you love each other at that
moment.