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│Antony Hamilton

Antony Hamilton was appointed artistic director and co-CEO of Chunky Move in 2019. His choreographic practice examines the elemental and primordial nature of the body, set against intersecting narratives that explore past, present, and future. He often employs a sophisticated melding of movement, sound, and visual design to collaboratively imagine complete worlds, and develops new choreographic languages to occupy them.

Hamilton has been the recipient of major fellowships: Bangarra Dance Theatre (Russell Page Fellowship), Tanja Liedtke Foundation, Australia Council for the Arts, and Sidney Myer Foundation. In 2013, he was resident director of Lucy Guerin Inc and in 2014 was guest dance curator at The National Gallery of Victoria. He was also the inaugural international resident artist at Dancemakers Toronto from 2016 to 2018. Hamilton has created numerous national and international commissions, including Keep Everything and I Like This for Chunky Move, Black Project 3 for The Lyon Opera Ballet (France), Sentinel for Skanes Dansteater (Sweden), and They Want New Language for La Comète (France).

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.