Tao Dance Theater,
China, and Postmodernism

Hentyle Yapp

Tao Dance Theater is one of the few Chinese companies to make regular appearances on Western stages, drawing equally on locally informed aesthetics and the formalism of postmodern dance and its successors. Scholar Hentyle Yapp profiles the troupe, whose singular style rethinks how we discuss non-Western dance beyond solely the universal or the particular.

Tao Dance Theater began in 2008 as a collaboration between Tao Ye, Duan Ni, and Wang Hao, quickly emerging on the global contemporary and modern dance scene. One of their early works, 4, established their renown in 2012, helping Tao Dance Theatre become one of China’s top touring contemporary companies, performing across stages in Australia, Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Lasting thirty minutes, 4 is emblematic of the company’s larger aesthetic: formalist experimentation that is at times fast-paced, with explosive movements exploring kinetic ricochets across and through the dancers’ bodies with minimal muscular engagement. The company has continued creating works in a numbered series, progressing from 2 all the way up to, most recently, 16 and 17.

Since Tao Ye, one of the choreographers, was educated in Chongqing, a major city in southwestern China, and worked with two of the country’s biggest modern dance companies, most journalists and popular discourse have situated the artist and the company primarily within the Chinese context. However, their use of movement, sound, and costume draws on a long legacy of aesthetic experimentation and formalism, prompting some reviewers to compare him to US and European luminaries like Lucinda Childs and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

This formalist approach can be seen either as an all-encompassing lens through which to understand Tao’s choreography, or as an aesthetic at odds with his Chineseness. Yet Tao Dance Theater is neither merely an example of a Chinese company nor simply a universal instance of modern and contemporary dance; instead, their unique style expands how we consider and discuss dance from non-Western countries.

Tao Ye was first introduced to modern and contemporary dance while performing in an army troupe. During an impromptu class, a teacher from Shanghai’s Jin Xing Dance Theater introduced the choreographer to the aesthetics of modern and contemporary dance. Afterwards, Tao Ye went on to work for Jin Xing Dance Theater and Beijing Modern Dance Company. Within China’s broader dance ecosystem, Tao Dance Theater certainly draws from a rich genealogy of modern/contemporary dance artists from China, Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong. Choreographers such as Lin Hwai-Min, Shen Wei, Yin Mei, and Eiko & Koma, among others, have established and expanded our understanding of modern and contemporary dance across Asia and its diasporas.

Tao Dance Theater works within a dance vocabulary that emphasizes movement experimentation, drawing from influences such as Trisha Brown’s release technique, while emphasizing aesthetic form. Drawing on his early modern dance training, Tao Ye has constructed what he calls a “circular movement system.” To generate movement, he asks dancers to activate all limbs and joints in ways that explore the relationship between different points: a point that triggers motion, another that initiates movement from one point to another, and the movement of a single point.

Together, this system trains dancers to develop a dual sense of control and release. In that sense, the company uses the body to explore ideas centered on formalism, in the vein of Merce Cunningham, Lucinda Childs, Ralph Lemon, and Boris Charmatz. What Tao Dance Theater has in common with these choreographers is a commitment to expand and reconsider our understanding of movement, the body, dance, time, and space.

The company operates within and beyond these two genealogies that draw from across Asia and the larger world. The company is neither simply a particularized example of a Chinese company nor purely part of a universal dance community centered on formalism and experimentation. Its existence as both complicates easy, automatic narratives.

Placing these perspectives together brings up a different set of questions: How have artists drawn from their particular contexts to engage broader, universal aesthetics and questions—not only Tao Ye in contemporary China, but also Merce Cunningham in the US in the 1960s? Why is dance discourse structured in ways that do not allow for a more expansive engagement with both the universal and the particular?

With its multiple traditions and genealogies, Tao Dance Theater opens up that discourse, especially as more companies from beyond the major centers of contemporary and modern dance (presumed to be the US and Western Europe) continue to circulate. These companies are not merely emblematic of their local contexts, reducing dance to an ethnographic snapshot of a locale like China, or part of some universal language centered on movement. Rather, they provide the opportunity to understand their work on its own terms, free of stereotypes.

Hentyle Yapp is an associate professor of performance studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic and the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value. A former professional dancer, he has performed with companies in New York, Taiwan, and San Francisco.

16 and 17
Choreography: Tao Dance Theater
From 16 to 17 October 
at Daehakro Arts Theater
as a part of Festival in Seoul by Dance Reflections by Van Cleef and Arpels