This performance-lecture delves into the documentary dance performance Red, choreographed by Wen Hui and dramaturged by Kai Tuchmann, which explores politics and identity through archival material. Red takes inspiration from the ballet The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军), a symbol of socialist aesthetics during the Cultural Revolution in China, blending Western techniques with traditional Chinese dance. On stage, two generations of female dancers confront this complex work through movement—juxtaposing lived experience with distant echoes of the past.

Kai Tuchmann is a director, dramaturg, and theatre practitioner from Berlin. In 2013 and 2015, he received two artist grants from the Goethe-Institut to carry out his artistic practice in Beijing. This led to his involvement with the Chinese theatre scene, including the company Caochangdi Working Station led by Wen Hui and Wu Wenguang. Between 2017-2021 he lived in Beijing and worked as a guest professor at the Department of Dramaturgy and Applied Theatre at Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama: the first major of this kind in the country. In the following years he collaborated with numerous Chinese artists and organisations, including the theatre company Grass Stage. Besides his own artistic practice, Tuchmann published articles in Chinese academic journals including Xiju and Jintian. In 2022, he edited the volume Postdramatic Dramaturgies: Resonances between Asia and Europe, which has become a reference point for the study of dramaturgy in contemporary China. His most recent book (together with Anuja Ghosalkar) is the edited volume Documentary Theatre in India - Assembling Publics, Performing Politics (transcript 2025)

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• DATE: Thursday, May 28, 2026
• TIME: 16:45-18:15
• LOCATION: MediaLab Stage (Bühne des MediaLabs), UZA 2, Rotunde, Stiege H, Ebene 1&3, Josef-Holaubek-Platz 2, 1090 Wien