By Ellen Gerdes for The Dance Journal

We began with legs bent low, pelvis free of tension, and hands held softly in front of our energy center (dantian).  As we performed a series of pliés in parallel, we drew breath up from the soles of our feet, through our spine, out our fingertips, and down again.  This exercise, called “Riding a horse” in tai chi, served as the foundation for the rest of the class.   We practiced the principle of circulating our energy during plies, footwork, and slow combinations of body spirals.   It became a challenge to maintain during unfamiliar Chinese opera kicks and walks, inward rotations, and flexed feet.  We ended in a seated lotus position, in stillness.

Taiwanese dancer Hsu Hui Huang led the class through explanation, humor, and his exemplary movement awareness.  As the energy throughout his body appeared to equalize in intensity, his core remained strong and his limbs easily responded to his full breath as if investigating their own sinew and bone.  Even his fingertips appeared ripe with movement purpose.  He spoke of yin and yang and the simultaneity of opposite energies, asserting that movement originates from stillness.  He said, “The relevé and the plié are not opposite actions, but the same action.”  He told us to be like bamboo, hollow yet strong.  The remarkable clarity and seamless fluidity of Huang’s movement distinguishes him from other dancers; he moves with both power and softness.

For those dancers in attendance, Huang’s workshop at the CHI Movement Arts Center (home of Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers) is an opportunity to explore new movement qualities, even injury prevention, but it is also a window into Asian aesthetics, philosophy, and creativity.  Kun-Yang Lin, Associate Professor at the Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University and Artistic Director of Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers, hopes to take full advantage of Huang’s residency to delve deeper into his own creative practices and to further his dancers’ understanding of the impulses that inform his work.

Huang has toured internationally with the world-renowned Cloudgate Dance Theatre, Taiwan’s first modern dance company.  After dancing with the company for 13 years, he is now a master teacher of modern technique for its professionals and director of the teacher-training program for Cloudgate’s network of dance schools.  He joined the company in 1993, the same year Lin left Taiwan in pursuit of a dancing career in the West – first in Europe and then in New York.  During these recent years, Cloudgate Dance Theatre has increasingly incorporated tai chi, meditation, martial arts, and calligraphy with the movement forms of Chinese opera, modern dance, and ballet.  One prime example is  (Moon Water), which the company performed in 2003 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Kun-Yang Lin’s choreographic work is unabashedly contemporary, yet draws upon these Asian movement and meditation influences and their emphasis on energy and breath.  Lin and Huang are enjoying this two-week residency as artistic collaboration.  The two friends have spent the first week together practicing meditation, qigong, and calligraphy.  Lin says, “We are comparing notes about our creative processes and I am learning what I missed when I left Taiwan.  Since I left, it’s like your roots are calling you, but you can only listen.”  Lin is eager to share Huang’s training method and his own artistic roots with the Philadelphia dance community.  At the same time, Huang is gaining inspiration from Lin’s extensive training and performance experience in the West, enriching his own understanding of East-West artistic integration.

Supported by a grant from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through Dance Advance, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers will bring to the community a number of events about contemplative practices and the creative process.  The company members will all attend Huang’s technique classes this week as well as apply the training to rehearsals of Lin’s work, Traces of Brush, the revised version of which will be performed at The Painted Bride on March 18-20, 2010.  Huang and Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers will share insights from this process at an open dialog for the public, where they will demonstrate such tai chi concepts as movement from stillness and breathing from your heels.  In the upcoming months, American visual artist Jeff Sable will also lead workshops and dialog based on his own integration of contemplative practices.

All three artists, Lin, Huang, and Sable, begin their artistic practices by looking inward.   In class, Huang demonstrated through articulate embodiment the tai chi principle that one must move inward before moving outward.  He spoke of centering yourself by quieting your mind and becoming sensitive to the chi in your body.  Chi, translated from Mandarin can be understood as “energy” “vital life source” or “breath.” In an era when we spend hours a day sitting at a computer or stuck in traffic, we can all learn from these lessons of physical presence and mindful breathing.  Lin reminds us that in Chinese philosophy: “If we are not breathing, we are not living.  If we are not moving, we are not living.”

CHI Movement Arts Center
1316 S. 9th St., Philadelphia PA 19147
Info: www.kunyanglin.org

July 27-July 30, 12:30-2:00pm
Contemporary Dance Technique Class with Hsu-Hui Huang

August 2 (Sun.) at 2:00pm
Free Open Dialog with Hsu-Hui Huang & Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers
(for dancers and non-dancers)

August 9, 16; September 13, 20, 27; October 4, 11:30am-12:30pm
Contemplative Practices Workshops with Visual Artist Jeff Sable
(for dancers and non-dancers)

October 11 (Sun.) at 2:00pm
Free Open Dialog with Jeff Sable & Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers
(for dancers and non-dancers)
October 11 (Sun.) at 2:00pm