The Moment 刻

Choreographer & Performer: KT YAU Ka Hei

Description

It is not a still life, but still and alive.
The Moment 刻 explores the performativity of stillness and the dynamics of the gaze. Drawing from KT Yau’s previous “Life Drawing” research project, the work investigates how the act of posing and being observed transcends the realm of visual arts practice.

In live drawing sessions, Yau invited her mother, ex-boyfriend, and a professional portrait artist to closely observe and depict her nude form. As they drew, the inviters were asked to verbalize their immediate impressions, memories, and thoughts triggered from their observation. These reflections revealed the complex power dynamics at play — the mother-daughter relationship, the intimacy of former lovers, gender perspectives, aesthetics and history on nude mode drawing, and more.

Beyond a mere still life, The Moment 刻 animates this state of “stillness” on stage. Drawing the reference from the tradition of “tableau vivant” (living picture) — the work positions the performer’s frozen pose as a site of performativity. The audience’s gaze is given new dimensions, moving between empathy and voyeurism, aesthetics and objectification. Juxtaposing the verbatim materials with the state of stillness and transformation on stage, KT is constructing a work with an autobiographical lens filtered through the eyes of others. With the verbatim records are being transformed into a foreign language in which the power relations are presented in this new version, in challenging the way Yau in positioning the memory and performance. In between stillness and movement, verbatim and performance, intimacy and distance, the work revealed the meaning of nudity and nakedness.