Foto ©: Alexander Huber

From Orchid Fingers to Clenched Fists: The Transformation of Female Figures from Chinese Xiqu to Model Play

“Her Face, The Hands, Finally Her Hair” is a solo dance performance about Chinese women’s hair, body and revolution. The title is quoted from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Vom ertrunkenen Mädchen” to reflect on the death of revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. A woman’s face, hands, and hair are not only physical features, but also carry symbolic meaning.

Her face, the hands, finally her hair explores how political violence imprints itself on women’s bodies across generations. The work begins with the story of the choreographer’s grandmother, who lost her hair—and with it, a profound part of her dignity—during China’s Cultural Revolution.

In this lecture performance, Yinfu starts with analysing and learning body movement from the revolutionary female character from her grandma’s time to see “What revolution happened on the theater stage responding to the political movement” ?

BIO

Yinfu Gao is a freelance performance artist, director, and theater critic from China, currently based in Frankfurt am Main.

Her artistic practice focuses on feminist perspectives and representations of the female body in Chinese sociocultural contexts.

Combining self-written texts with movement, she creates documentary and site-specific performances that critically engage with social memory, gender, and East Asian identity.

Since 2022, Yinfu has been developing a performance trilogy on women in her family and Chinese feminist movements across the 20th century: Mulans (about the feminist wave of 1919), Her Face, the Hands, Finally Her Hair (on revolutionary model plays and her grandmother’s experience during the Cultural Revolution), and Half of the Sky, the Whole Sky (premiering in Frankfurt in Dec. 2025, exploring female writing under Mao-era gender policies). For the feminist performance Mulans, Yinfu received the Szenenpreis of the MADE Festival Hessen 2024.