Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company Announces Guest Artists And Schedule For Free Classes On Zoom

In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company has established a new dance institute through Zoom, The Bridge.

The Institute's aim is to bring together dancers, choreographers and directors around the world to experience the master teachers of color whose practices are embedded in the community and are focused on advancing the art of dance that transform the personal, environmental and metaphysical spaces. Interested dancers can join the class by registering on Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company's website: http://nainichen.org/company-class.

For the week of 9/14/2020, The Bridge welcomes new guest artist Rulan Tangen. Rulan offers the session as an opening to ancient ideas of movement, sound and rhythm, as central to rituals for transformation, while embracing cyberspace as a realm of intercultural exchange and collaboration that paves the way to embodiment of imagined realm of liberation. We transcend the box to revitalize and remember our connection to land, water, and skies of the place where we are where we come from, and where we are going, with 'land dance' practice as adapted to current times, incorporating multi sensory and multi-dimensional imagination to engage 'out of the box' .

This offering will bring an opportunity for us to meet as modern people of this time, and diverse places, to embody relationship of reciprocity with self, spirit, community, and beyond human realm , so that we can consider in motion our responsibility as artists to make the movements that reflect the issues of our time, and the ways of being that transcend time.

Personal note from Rulan: As a woman of color confronting disabilities post-cancer, I create dances for the health of all beings. Life is marked by rituals - as our original theater - and I dedicate my life to performances that become functional rituals for transformation.

Now 'dreamvisioning' as the Director/Choreographer of DANCING EARTH my work is made through living culture which is my research; working closely over years with a diaspora of intertribal elders and community members in many locations with which I have a cyclical relationship. My process is thus the story of "we" - intergenerational, multilingual, inter-tribal convergence of artists, culture-carriers, farmers, activists, community members, dissolving borders to move into collaborative practices that become dance forms embodying sustainability, resilience, and vitality as expressions of multi-perspectivist ancestral worldviews of collaborators as well as myself.

As a virtual dance institute, The Bridge will invite world renowned as well as up and coming dancers and choreographer to come to guest teach the class. Advanced/Intermediate level professional or pre-professional dancers who are looking to explore beyond their own boundaries and looking for new dance experiences are encouraged to participate. The core program is based on Nai-Ni Chen's Kinetic Spiral, which is a cross-cultural dance vocabulary that integrates the Chinese martial arts philosophy in TaiChi with contemporary dance practices she studied in America. Guest artists will cover a wide range of folk and classical dance styles.

The Bridge Classes are as follows:

Week of 9/14/2020

Monday Greta Campo (Kinetic Spiral)

Tuesday Rulan Tangen (Dancing Earth)

Wednesday Nai-Ni Chen (Kinetic Spiral)

Thursday Yuka Notsuka (Kinetic Spiral)

Friday Pei-Ju Chien-Pott (Modern - Graham)