Review: GuoGuoHuiHui's Re-shaping Identity
Re-shaping Identity
GuoGuoHuiHui
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
1 March 2026
Adelaide Festival
Outside of China, the country tends to be viewed as a monolith of one people with a singular, powerful culture. But although Han Chinese predominate, making up over 90% of the population, there are 55 other ethnic groups, each with their own distinctive language, culture and dance traditions. A new work from the GuoGuoHuiHui, a Guangzhou-based dance entity comprising choreographer Guo Rui and artist Wu Hui, Re-shaping Identity questions the relationship of the individual to the traditions of the collective through the medium of dance, specifically folk dance. The five dancers are of different Chinese ethnicities, and they each contribute their own life stories and dance histories to the work.
Speaking in English, Han choreographer Guo Rui begins by explaining that as a dance student he learnt a Han folk dance from a man who worked in the fields all his life, which had given him hunched shoulders and a head tilt, giving a distinctly individual cast to how he performed the dance. This led Rui to thinking about the relationship of the individual to the collective, and about that between the abstract, impersonal folk dance and the individuals who perform it.
Dressed in street clothes, the full cast then appears, standing motionless centre stage. Initial tiny movements of the shoulders and torso gradually morph into slow motion movements of the arms and shaking of the legs. One by one they break out of the formation, circling the others and bopping to house music. When they exit, the female dancer left behind delivers a speech in Mandarin, with English surtitles projected on the cyclorama, about her distant relationship to her Yao ancestry. As the others line up across the front of the stage and sway side to side, this extremely beguiling dancer performs some traditional dance moves, with intricate hand movements and alternately forced and natural smiles to snatches of traditional musical accompaniment.
This establishes the pattern of the middle section of the work, with each dancer speaking about their ancestry—Yao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Han and Mongolian respectively—their relationship to the notion of home and their familiarity, or lack thereof, with their ethnic background and dance tradition. Thus, the Tibetan dancer speaks nostalgically of Tibet and of how lost he felt moving to the big city; the Mongolian of her joy in breaking into the folk dance she grew up with, and so forth. After each of these monologues, the speaker executes a solo that gives a glimpse of the traditional form but is subtly infused with moves from other idioms such as ballet and popular dance.
The final section begins with a green carpet being unfurled beneath the Mongolian dancer, signifying the sweeping grasslands of her homeland, before the others start bedecking her with various items of traditional costume. Beaded and feathered necklaces and headdresses are soon embellished with plastic flowers and silver air-conditioning ducts, opening up the question of how traditional forms can survive in a globalized, rootless world. The final section has the whole cast dressed in fluorescent garb bopping to house music under ultra-violet lighting while questions such as ‘Is change betrayal?’ are projected onto the backcloth. This segment goes on for far too long, but the work is otherwise both thought-provoking and very engaging. The performers are terrific and together they explode the notion of any singular Chinese identity, showing instead that identity is mutable, or in the words of the program, ‘a living, breathing verb.’
-Maggie Tonkin