The talk “Contemporary Dance & France” aims to introduce general audiences to the development of French contemporary dance since the 1980s. It will explore major choreographers and their notable works, probing questions about their dance philosophies and practices: What defines dance? How does the presence of the body relate to the meaning of production? What qualitative transformations occur in time and space? What kind of audience does dance aspire to engage? How does dance contribute to our understanding of the world? This talk offers an in-depth exploration for those interested in understanding the distinctiveness of French dance culture and its global impact.
CHEN Ya-ping (PhD in Performance Studies, NYU)
A dance scholar and critic, is associate professor and director of Master’s and PhD programs at the School of Dance, Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan. She served as the president of Taiwan Dance Research Society from 2019-2022. She authors two Chinese monographs: Beholding Wugou: Reading Lin Lee-Chen’s Dances through Zhuangzi, Animism, and Post humanity (forthcoming in August 2024) and Enquiry into Subjectivity: Modernity, History, Taiwan Contemporary Dance (2011); coedits two anthologies: Corporeality One: In Search of Asian Corporeality (2021) and Corporeality Two: Archive, Medium, Technique (2024). Her research interests are dance history, theories of modernity, transcultural studies of corporeal philosophy, interdisciplinary studies on Zhuangzi, New Materialism and post humanist theories.
