festival
Jessie Jing
BIO
Jessie Jing is a Malaysian contemporary dance artist, choreographer and writer based in London and most recently, Kuala Lumpur. She is a 2021 MFA Choreography graduate from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance as a Leverhulme Arts Scholar, with her research centred around contemporary dance, poetry, and the constructs of memory and storytelling, through the development of her artistic process, Poethesis. She is also one of the recipients of the Malaysian BOH Cameronian x Kakiseni New Production Grant which will see to developing and staging this repertoire in Malaysia for 2023.
In 2020, Jessie published her debut poetry book, Manuscripts of the Mind. She was also selected by March Art House as one of the 7 artists for the virtual exhibition, We Are Womxn. As a performer, Jessie had, to date, performed across Europe, Hong Kong and China, and Malaysia for various theatre, film, corporate events and commercial projects, most recently as a performer for Royal Opera House. She was part of the associate dancer programme with Watkins Dance Company, and is currently an associate partner of theArtists, member of Ranbu Collective and founding artist of Have you eaten yet? Collective.
Stateless Mind #4
Performance Title
Body Clippings
Duration: 15 mins
Body Clippings is a dance art performance derived from the fragments and semiotics of memories and thoughts of land, heritage, and ancestry drawn from family history and bodily knowledge. It reflects on the meaning of what Home / Malaysianness / Asianness is— one that continuously shifts as it is shaped— as well as the lived, spatiotemporal experiences of a body from a generation far removed from the first generation predecessors of Malaysian-Chinese diaspora, resulting in dissonance with the identity of the self, one’s claim to a motherland, and the establishment of a place called Home.
“These clippings of memory perhaps act as ‘points of rest’ for my mind; something to go home to; latch onto as something familiar; something with sentiment allowing me to build the image of home- a place where I could belong to with this liminal, diasporic being, identity and existence” - Jing.
A wearable art piece is created in tangent with the dance that hangs the clippings on Jing’s body hereby carrying compounded memories, generational knowledge and trauma, and hope.
