Dancing for the Future: Reflecting on Dance Education Now

※ Free; registration opens in October.

In the face of new technologies, social media culture, declining birthrates, and a shifting international landscape, there are real opportunities to redefine dance and physical education. What kinds of choreographers, dancers, and performers do we hope that educational institutions can cultivate over the next decade? This forum invites choreographers and educators to share their reflections on educational institutions and the performing arts field to jointly develop a blueprint for the next generation of dance education. 

Moderator│River Lin

Working across the contexts of theatre, dance, Live Art, visual art and queer culture, River Lin is an artist-curator based in Paris and Taipei. He’s initiated and directed several projects at Taipei Performing Arts Center including ADAM (since 2017), Camping Asia (since 2019). Since 2023, he has served as Curator of Taipei Arts Festival. Currently he is also Guest-Curator of 2025 Biennial de la Danse de Lyon, Co-Curator of Indonesia Dance Festival, Guest-Editor at OnCurating Journal and Curatorial Board at Curating in Performing Arts, the University of Salzburg.

Panelist│Saori Hala

©️NanakoKobayashi

Born in 1988 and based in Tokyo, Saori Hala is a dance artist whose practice emerges from the idea of the body as a perceptual apparatus. With a background in design and ecological psychology, she creates interdisciplinary performance works that interweave video, text, and drawing. Through the practice of bodily action, her work reexamines the boundaries between reality and fiction, self and other, and seeks to intervene in the processes through which sensations and memories are organized.

Major works include Da Dad Dada, a self-documentary performance reflecting on her relationship with her late father—a former musical dancer—and postwar Japanese cultural history, and P wave, which explores how bodies and societies live in resonance with seismic tremors. Her works have been presented in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Germany, among other locations, and at international festivals such as Dance New Air, HOTPOT, and YPAM.

Currently active as an educator, Hala teaches at Musashino Art University, Tama Art University, and Tokyo University of the Arts. In Japan, she also founded and directs PORT, a peer-critique platform for young performance artists.

Her academic background includes an M.A. in Design from Tokyo University of the Arts and an M.A. in Dance (Solo/Dance/Authorship) from the Berlin University of the Arts. A Saison Foundation Fellow for 2025, Hala continues to develop projects that bridge body-based performance, visual art, and contemporary thought.

Panelist│Thanapol Virulhakul

A Bangkok-based choreographer whose work explores how the body registers, resists, and reveals social and political forces. With a background in film and photography from Thammasat University, he approaches choreography not just as the composition of movement, but as a practice and strategy for questioning established structures, unsettling perceptions, and cultivating collective imagination. His performances often challenge conventional frameworks, creating shared spaces of tension, relation, and perceptual shift.

His work has been presented internationally at festivals such as Theaterformen (Germany), TPAM – Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, Offene Welt Festival (Ludwigshafen), and SIFA – Singapore International Festival of Arts, GHOST:2561 and BIPAM. He has been an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and a fellow at the Theatertreffen International Forum (Berlin).

Early in his career, he was selected for the Korean-Asean Fellowship (2005) and the John F. Kennedy Center’s modern dance program (2010). Notable works include TRANSACTION (2013), Hipster The King (2014), Girl X (2015, with Suguru Yamamoto), Happy Hunting Ground (2016), The Retreat (2018–2020), and INTERMISSION (2023).

In 2024, he founded Backroom – Ritual Studio in Bangkok, a platform for embodied practices, performative rituals, and alternative choreographic inquiry.

Panelist│Melissa Quek

Melissa Quek is the Head of The School of Dance & Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore. The School includes 3 Bachelor's degree programmes and 3 Diploma programmes spanning Acting, Musical Theatre, Performance, Dance and Theatre Production and Management. She also leads the Diploma in Dance and teaches on the BA (Hons) International Contemporary Dance Practices programmes, where she applies her experience as a choreographer, performer and educator in creating collaborative interdisciplinary experiences for and with her students.  With The Kueh Tutus (a collective dedicated to creating dance performances for young audiences, birth to 12 years) Melissa makes multi-sensory works, aiming to unlock the imaginations of parent and child. She is interested in the Body-Subject, how a dancing body thinks and the development of the Singaporean dance scene. She has contributed a chapter on Contemporary Dance in Singapore for the book “Evolving Synergies: Celebrating Dance in Singapore”, co-wrote the chapters ‘Exploring Dance Improvisation and Composition from a Rhythmic Perspective’ in Improvisation Methods and Practices in Southeast Asia and ‘‘Open Culture” as practiced by three Singaporean dance pioneers’ in Dance On! Dancing through Life. Her reviews of dance performances can sometimes be spotted in the Singaporean Newspaper The Straits Times.

Panelist│Tung I-Fen
 

©Kris Kang

Tung performs or makes choreography in various contexts, including dance, theatre, film, contemporary music and technical art, among others, while laying her artistic practices in the agency and intersections of humanity, society and nature. She co-founded “Dance Park”, a peer-to-peer learning platform designed for young dancers and artists in an interdisciplinary context. In recent years, Tung’s also played a curatorial role for performance programs at large-scale public-art festivals and cultural events. Now is Full-time Lecturer in University of Taipei, Co-Artistic Director of Fist & Cake Production.