TAO Dance Theater to Perform at Arts Centre Melbourne

Renowned Chinese choreographer Tao Ye's world of minimalist contemporary dance where sublime forces animate bodies will be brought to the Arts Centre Melbourne stage in a co-presentation with Chunky Move of his TAO Dance Theater works on Thursday 6 August and as part of Supersense - Festival of the Ecstatic from 7-8 August. His unique works, 4 and 5, shimmer with striking graphic composition and are freed of narrative and representational confinement in favour of pure imaginative possibility.

TAO Dance Theater has shaken China's dance world since 2008 with a series of minimalist works that both recognise and transcend the limits of the individual form, with choreographer Tao Ye developing techniques that enable dancers to explore their most extreme potential. His commitment to free interpretation by his audience goes so far as to refuse the naming of his works - which are numbered instead - and his ritualistic explorations of the process of perception suggest a rigour approaching the sacred.

In 4, bodies seem to seek one another while being split apart by an unseen yet compelling force. In 5, an unseen force keeps the bodies together in an indistinguishable, kaleidoscopic mass. Both pieces are accompanied by the music of Chinese Indie-folk-rock composer Xiao He, whose music seems to spring from a similar, unspecified, but no less insistent power.

Choreographer Tao Ye believes a single word or phrase is insufficient to encapsulate the meaning in a work of contemporary dance theater. Titles can set preconceptions in the audience and limit creative direction. His numbered series of minimalist experimentations explore the potential of the human body as a visual element, freed from the limitations of representation or narrative.

"No specific words can express the meaning of (the) performance. Rather, these pieces are permeated with our conceptions of 'the body' and physical practice. So what your eyes perceive is exactly what our hearts hope to express," said Tao Ye.

Stephen Armstrong, Creative Producer, Asian Performing Arts Program, Arts Centre Melbourne said the Asian Performing Arts Program took audiences deep into the imagination of the most original artists from our region.

"However intrinsic cultural tradition might be in the languages of performance, there is an originality and daring at play that we recognised as the contemporary at its best,' he said.

"Tao Ye's transforming choreography epitomises this, reaching across time and beyond the material. His work exists by virtue of the audience's capacity for sensation: it is experience itself."

Since its founding in 2008, TAO Dance Theater has toured more than thirty countries on five continents. TAO was the first contemporary dance company from China invited to perform in Lincoln Center Festival (US) and the Sydney Opera House ; the second invited to perform at the American Dance Festival (ADF); and the first Chinese company invited to be artists-in-residence for ADF's six-week festival.

In 2013, TAO Dance Theater was invited to perform as part of the opening of the Second Beijing International Ballet and Choreography Competition at Beijing's prestigious National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), followed two months later by the company's featured performances at the NCPA, the first in their home country after nearly three years of international touring.

Recent commissions include 6: The Sami Chinese Project by Norrlands Operan for the opening performance of the 2014 European Capital of Culture; 7 for Sadler's Wells and Adelaide Festival Centre in 2014; and 8 for the Institute of Asian Cultural Development / Asian Culture Complex-Asian Arts Theatre in Gwangju, Korea in 2015.

TAO Dance Theater is presented for Supersense by Arts Centre Melbourne's Asian Arts Program in collaboration with Sophia Brous. The Asian Arts Program is supported by the Kenneth Myer Asian Theatre Series Endowment Fund which was established with a grant from The Myer Foundation through the 2009 Commemorative Grants Program and founding gifts from the late Mrs Neilma Gantner, Mr Carrillo Gantner AO and Mrs ZiYin Gantner, and Mr Baillieu Myer AC and Mrs Sarah Myer.

To post a comment, you must register and login.