Concepts of Workshops
TAO Dance Theater is dedicated to the exploration of a radical technique of body movement and is celebrated by critics and lovers of dance worldwide. Dancers at TAO Dance Theater are trained to repeatedly challenge and realize the potentials and possibilities inherent to their physique, in other words, to attempt to break free from the constraints of the body and the expectations of the mind. Since 2009, TAO Dance Theater has been invited to hold more than 90 workshops and lectures on art festivals, in schools and other art establishments, including the American Dance Festival, New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Amsterdam Dance Centre, Singapore International Arts Festival, Dong Eui University, Taipei National University of the Arts, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Beijing, Beijing Dance Academy, and Minzu University of China. In 2010,TAO Dance Theater held a series of 40 non-commercial workshops with Beijing Modern MOMA Art Center, Penghao Theater, and Beijing Dance Academy – a program which saw the participation of more than 1,000 individuals.
In October 2012, TAO Dance Theater held a series of modern dance workshops in Shanghai, Xi’an, Guangzhou, and Beijing, drawing attention from all sectors of society.
Concepts of Movements
In face of the kaleidoscopic paths on which one’s body could be explored, TAO Dance Theater discloses the meaning of the value over the ‘core’ of life, through repeated and accumulating active forces. This workshop is a ceaseless direction of practice, and it keeps fermenting in various stages of ‘storing-up’.
The objective of the TAO Dance Theater workshop is to enable one to unfetter one’s body and uncover its underlying possibilities. The whole course revolves around the relaxing of one’s joints, the shifting of one’s body weight, and the idea of weightiness. To relax is to move in a special state where muscles interlinking the joints throughout the body are lax. To shift one’s body weight is to place one’s center of mass in a space outside one’s body. The idea of weightiness represents the force that gravity exerts on our body, and the relationship between that force and the ground. This whole exercise puts an emphasis on its being scientific – driven by the purpose of excavating more possibilities innate to our body – it seeks to reveal interesting transitions between one move and another, it challenges the capabilities of the body itself, it trains our mind to issue precise and refined commands to the most minute muscles of the body, it guides us to perceive the moving nature that is essential to our body, and it extends our whole conception of kinesthesis to an external space. The workshop also stresses on a special breathing technique. With this technique, in one’s movement one feels the movement of air in one’s surrounding space. This enables one to find a release of breath in the interim between the dancing play of wind and shadows. By placing one’s center of mass inversely onto a location external to one’s body, one enters a world of potential where a self-induced sense of weightlessness, an inertial and an un-inertial mode of movement, the weight that gravity exerts on our body, and the weight-relationship between the body and the ground, could all be freely explored.
TAO Dance Theater’s training techniques are derived from Tao Ye and Duan Ni’s personal experience as dancers and their individual styles. The workshop examines different ways of initiating muscle movement, e.g. the rebounding inertia of gravitational forces, the control over out-of-balance mid-body transitional movements, and the associative movements of joints and interlinking muscles. It also examines the adjustment of spatial relationships dictated by the mind, the transition of temporal rhythms, and the difference between internal and external self-absorbed reflections, which is in turn utilized to explore more potential movements.
In face of the kaleidoscopic paths on which one’s body could be explored, TAO Dance Theater discloses the meaning of the value over the ‘core’ of life, through repeated and accumulating active forces. This workshop is a ceaseless direction of practice, and it keeps fermenting in various stages of ‘storing-up’.
