About 8
TAO Ye’s piece 8 is the last of his “Straight Line Trilogy”. This piece furthers Tao’s characteristic line of creative exploration. It uncovers the innate logic of bodily movement through an accumulation by the repetition of movements, and through the investigation of possible movements within the constraints imposed on our body. In other words, it presents an aesthetic that belongs uniquely to the human body. The music of 8 is composed by Xiaohe, a talented Chinese indie-folk-rock composer. Throughout 6 and 7, all the dancers stand in a straight line. Precisely the same distance is kept between each dancer. As the dancers perform identical movements at the same rhythm, individual minds converge under the shared motion, and a sense of harmony and vitality emerge from this process. Extreme concentration and well-coordinated movements are required of TAO’s dancers. This forms a repetition-ritual of natural sequence. In 8, which presents the idea of depletion and processual accumulation, dancers continue to stand in a straight line, breathing in sync. The addition of one more dancer makes a huge difference to 8, as compared with 6 and 7, in terms of the possibility that the chain of dancers could contain. In performance, the dancers lie on the stage-floor instead of standing, in this way their bodies are further restricted to the floor and movements are limited to the moving range of their spines. The dancers’ vision is also restricted to a horizontal dimension instead of an all-encompassing one. Under this limitation, the capabilities of the body of the dancers’ can be further explored and released. So from the audience’s point of view, no heads, arms or legs are to be seen, whereas the torso comes into central focus. In the dancers’ wave-like motion, a dynamic and flowing charm is conveyed following the breakthrough of the restriction of the spine in 8.
Duration: 41 minutes
Choreographer: TAO Ye
Music: Xiaohe
Lighting : TAO Ye, MA Yue
Costume: TAOYe, DUAN Ni, phaédostudio
Dancers: FU Liwei, MAO Xue, YU Jinying, HUANG Li, MING Da, HU Jing, YAN Yulin, JIANG Yunhui
Premiere: October 23rd, 2015 Shanghai International Arts Festival (China)
Co-commissioned by
Shanghai International Arts Festival (China)
Sadler’s Wells London (UK)
Asia Culture Center-Theater (Gwangju, Korea)
National Taichung Theater
About 9
The human body is the sole channel of artistic exploration in the Numerical Series of TAO Dance Theater. Numerical Series is a project that is without narrative and is not driven by emotions. Rather, it studies the limits and limitations of the human body whereby a uniquely rational aesthetic and training system are distilled from a vital and energetic exercise of the human body which is structured around repetitions – it is only through repetition that the various kinds of limits of human movement could be adumbrated.
The past seven works in the Numerical Series, namely 2, Weight x 3 , 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, established a rigorous and progressive order in terms of both the artistic concepts behind each choreography and the types of body movements involved. This new work, 9, on the other hand, will seek to assemble, or perhaps even override this progressive order. Therefore, 9 will seek the origin through a series of “chaos”. Nonetheless, it is not yet determined whether this will mean the uncovering of a hidden disorder beneath an apparent, schematic form, or whether 9 will reconstruct an underlying interconnected substratum behind a chaotic surface.
The number 9 is significant in China’s cultural context – as the Chinese saying says, “as one progresses through nine multiples of nine hardships, one gets back to one”, which represents adversities, limitations, and a final revisit of one’s origin. 9, in relation to completed works in the Numerical Series, will certainly be an explosion of previously accumulated choreographic vocabularies, but it will also be a consummation of all conceptual undertakings of the entire series. 9 is therefore a crucial turning point in the Numerical Series – whether it will be the finale or the reset of the creation. The possibility of future work relies utterly on the careful completion of 9, from which artistic clues and inspirations for my next artistic advancement are to be identified and gleaned.
Artistic Director, TAO Ye’s choreography also revolves around two things: a taxonomy of ways of initiating body movement, and the human capacity for self-discipline. As a result, a unique training system, the “Circular Movement System”, is developed for dancers at TAO Dance Theater. Each completed work in the Numerical Series is a choreographic and aesthetic extension of a form of movement taken from this system. 4 represents a relatively comprehensive collection of movements that grew out of TAO Dance Theater’s training techniques. But 4 falls short of adequately encapsulating the subtle connection between bodies in motion or the textural and structural details of an actively moving human body. The “Circular Movement System” has since been updated and extended substantially through the exploration and accumulation of the daily training at TAO Dance Theater.
9 will present a scene that summarizes, but is nonetheless richer than the enclosed and completed “Circular Movement System”. The connection between moving bodies will be extracted from this system, then reconfigured to form the self-identifiable choreographic vocabularies that constitute the movements of the nine dancers in 9. These movements will form a code-like connection between dancers by which various spatial relationships are represented. 9 will depart from the monist, dualist and multiple ways of expression, and present a relationship between complexity and simplicity, which asks each member of the audience to discover and construct possible connections within the choreography individually and independently.
Duration: 41 minutes
Choreographer: TAO Ye
Music: Xiao He
Lighting : TAO Ye, MA Yue
Costume: phaédostudio, TAO Ye, DUAN Ni
Dancers: FU Liwei, MAO Xue, YU Jinying, HUANG Li, MING Da, HU Jing, YAN Yulin, ZHANG Qiaoqiao, GUO Huanshuo
Co-produced and co-commissioned by
Asia TOPA and Arts Centre Melbourne (Australia)
Sadler's Wells London (UK)
Théâtre de la Ville – Paris / La Villette-Paris (France)
Shanghai International Dance Center (China)
National Taichung Theater