In August 2024, the 2024 China Contemporary Dance Art Exhibition, hosted by the China Dancers Association and the Shenzhen Federation of Literary and Art Circles and organized by the Dance Art Center of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and other units, was held in Shenzhen. The dance video “A Moment of Thought” by the teacher-student team of Dance Department of School of Arts was finally shortlisted and was invited to participate in this exhibition. Recently, the school received the selection certificate.
The video creation project named Dance & Digital Possibilities, hosted by the China Dancers Association, was founded in 2016. It aims to encourage, discover and cultivate the original forces in dance and digital media and video creation against the backdrop of the development of dance and technology, and present the characteristics of contemporary Chinese dance. Through a national solicitation, the 2024 "Dance & Digital Possibilities" video creation project finally selected 17 dance video works to be shortlisted. The dance video work "A Moment of Thought", jointly choreographed and directed by two teachers, Peng Xiaoxi and Yan Wensheng, from the Dance Department of the School of Arts and presented by students majoring in dance performance in the class of 2019, was successfully shortlisted and made an appearance at the "Chinese Screen Dance Retrospective and YAPD Screen Dance Showcase" of the 2024 China Contemporary Dance Art Exhibition.
The creation and performance team of "A Moment of Thought" spent two years from dance choreography, stage presentation to the incubation of video scripts, location scouting, shooting and post-production, and finally polished the work into its final form. With the concept of "Tao" in the ancient Chinese philosophical thought system as its core, the work enters and realizes the "Tao" through dance. It combines the body movements of Chinese classical dance with the creative techniques of contemporary dance, and revolves around the movement trajectories of "circle" and "unity", showing the process of things changing from the opposition and mutual resistance of yin and yang to balance and harmony. Meanwhile, the work also selects the landscapes with the most regional and cultural characteristics in Chongqing, and vividly presents the harmonious unity of man and nature, body and mind in four parts: "seeing mountains", "seeing waters", "seeing the heart" and "seeing the Tao". Technically, the work attempts to use AI WinkStudio for image processing and the AI model developed by Adobe in cooperation with Photoshop AI for expansion.
Currently, the combination of art, artificial intelligence and video has become one of the main trends in contemporary Chinese art creation. In recent years, the Dance Department of the School of Art of Chongqing University has been committed to the reform of the training model for outstanding dance talents in the new era. The creation of the work "A Moment of Thought" is to explore the contemporary transformation of traditional dance and the integrated innovation of "dance + technology" by using digital technology and video techniques. This is not only an affirmation of the creative achievements of this team, but also a recognition of the cross-disciplinary and cross-media exploration of dance art creation by the School of Arts of Chongqing University.
