自我介紹 Dance Artist

“We as peripherals/subalterns often create works outside of the mainstream.”

made in Taiwan, active in America and quiet places. MFA from University of Utah. She has  a deep love for arts and nurturing harmony. Her work has been shown in Yuz Museum, Queens Museum, Museum of Chinese in America, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Fou Gallery, etc. She has worked with Dance: Gesel Mason, Susan Marshall, Maurice Fraga, Huiwang Zhang, Michel Kouakou, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Annie Wang, Tiffany Mills, Kyle Abraham, etc; Immersive Theater: Punchdrunk and Pig Iron; Visual Arts: Kiori Kawai, Thai Artist Alliance, Amy Khoshbin; Chinese Dance: HT Chen; Puppetry: Phantom Limbs and Loco 7;  Butoh: Ximena Garnica; Fashion: Bad Bintch Tong Tong+Stefanie Nelson Dancegroup; Film: Marta Renzi and Olab. She performed at Sleep No More NYC (original cast); and SNM Shanghai (performer & rehearsal director). She has toured with ANIKAYA to Palestine and African countries. She was a visiting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and an adjunct at U of California San Diego. She is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst (L/BMA), Yoga & Yoga Nidra Facilitator. She has bathed in contact improvisation since 2005 with occasional teaching. In her free time, she practices calligraphy, plays with voices, and makes bad arts. Recently, Ching-I & Penelope started the Inter-grant Festival: an annual platform at Arts On Site celebrating the voices of international artists who have successfully navigated the US immigration process. And she loves bananas. 

CV履歷

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

教書的想法

I, me, we artists often struggle to secure and validate a place in academia and education, a place and space where we belong and where we are the recognized progenitors and creative scholars.  As such, our bodies – as the primary instrument and holder of the artistic knowledge, have power to influence, shape and change one’s reality and experiential knowing. I am passionate about using a practice of embodiment as a way to engage and inspire people who are often minoritized and marginalized. I believe in teaching dance as composing topography for healing the physical and ancestral traumas – the repetition of sweat, blood, feces, and urine are all included in the lived experience of the embodied practice of movement, and that is part of the process of decomposing landscapes of translation and transmutation. Through the practice of repetition, endurance, intensification and exhaustion are parts of the necessary aftermath. The process represents how time can be used through dance to experience the now and shift into altered realms of being – from the physical to the ethereal realms of time (i.e., the past, present, future, and the alternate fantasy).  

In addition, I often use the practice of cultural sharing in my teaching because it cultivates in students the use of imagination and story-telling.  Here, the students are asked to suspend their disbelief and begin to take agency of their own practices, values and cultural experiences. Ultimately, my hope is to allow space in the learning process to give the students permission to  take risks, make mistakes and even fail at times, in order to grow because education through mutual sharing and transformation is a time honored process.

Overall, my lived experiences inform my teaching processes.  Most significant to my work are the five elements of Chinese Philosophy and life force – gold or metal, wood, water, fire, earth or soil.  These five elements are constantly in dialogue to negotiate the dynamic balance of the life forces in my teaching processes, creative work, rapport with students and personal responsibility.  As such, in my teaching philosophy, I seek to deepen the students’ sense of responsibility for the environment and the physical presence that embraces all bodies and spirits – the life harmony.

Edited by Dr. Elgie G. Sherrod

MFA Thesis

I seek to facilitate the process of listening through the sense of responsibility for the environment and the physical presence that embraces all bodies and spirits - the life harmony. My medium is through creating and sharing stories of conceptual landscapes and dances to extend invitation to all people.