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New Inside Out Artist Conversation with Li Ning

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In this episode of Inside Out, ELSEHERE sits down with Li Ning for a long, unhurried conversation on the body, performance, memory, migration, loss, and the strange ways art returns us to ourselves. Moving between rural childhood, breakdance culture in 1980s China, sculpture training, grief, contemporary dance, nudity, censorship, and the body’s own knowledge, Li Ning reflects on how movement first gave him back his body, then gave him a place to belong.

Why does a person dance?

Li Ning’s answer is not about dreams, passion, or career planning.It is something harsher, and more real:

Sometimes, if you do not dance, you cannot go on living.

In this episode, we speak with Li Ning at length about the body, dance, fatherhood, injury, growing up, desire, death, and art.From a rural childhood in northern China, to the breakdance wave of the 1980s, to contemporary dance and live art, what he offers is not a story of success, but the story of how a person can be interrupted by life again and again, and how the body can keep bringing him back to himself.

He says that at thirteen, dance gave him his body back.In his twenties, dance told him where he belonged.After his father’s death, dance became, for the first time, something like water, food, or air, not a profession, not a form of expression, but survival itself.

If what concerns you is not only what art is, but how a person comes to understand the world through the body, and how one can come back to life after loss, this is an episode worth staying with slowly.

Inside Out is ELSEHERE’s long-form conversation series, published through STRATUM Journal.This episode has been edited, transcribed, and translated from the original Mandarin recording.