Current Projects

For her new project with working title ‘The Life Drawing Project’, KT Yau Ka Hei invited three persons to live draw her nude still body. She uses the process of the drawing and the direct observations of her bodily appearance and postures as the creative basis for the work, while reducing the element of dance movement to a minimum. The three drawings were done by three people whom she has different relationships with in her life: her mother, her ex-boyfriend and a professional drawer she just met. The significance is not in the result or finished work, but the process of careful observation, instilling and documentation. The drawers express what they observe as they draw. By finding out how these outsiders view the current state of her body, tales on the relationship between the physical body, our personal life and the world around us unfold. What can a still female nude pose tell us, what politics does it instill, how can it communicate and how do we as audience, onlookers, voyeurs look at it. The piece had a first research period and work-in-progress sharing at West Kowloon Freespace (Hong Kong) in April 2023. We are currently looking for two more months of residency space and time, and possible co-producers/-presenters to continue this research into an evening-lenght solo. For the next phase of the research KT, together with a dramaturge, wants to re-analyse and deconstruct the material (video, drawings, interviews) and juxtapose this with a literature review on the politics of the female nude in both performance studies and feminist literature, with a focus on the work of Amelia Jones, Jill Dolan and Peggy Phelan, researching the female nude as a a complex and contested site of meaning constantly being negotiated and produced. Based on this research she wants to reframe her own materials in an evening-length work, using her own nude body to construct a dialogue on the politics of her own nude body with herself, the people she knows best, the audience and the society at large.