TAO Dance Theater Explores the Freedom of the Body Through Dance. What Happened in Its First 10 Years? | 100 People With Ideas

Surviving and creating — surviving may be the harder of the two.

On stage, everything but the white marley floor is black. No set, no extra apparatus. There is nowhere for the audience's eyes to land but the dance itself, and the lighting changes only four times in the whole performance, always in the plainest white. To the chanting of the folk singer Xiao He, four dancers in loose, wide-sleeved robes, their faces painted black, blur the lines of body, age, even gender. Alone and in concert they carry out a "circular motion," holding a diamond formation from beginning to end, and what comes of it is an orderly flow.

This is 4, a modern dance work by TAO Dance Theater.

In the piece that follows, 5, five dancers stay tangled and overlapping from the first minute to the last, like a huge braided rope that knots, unravels, and passes its shape along across the stage. There is no starting point and no end.

This year is TAO Dance Theater's tenth. The company made its name with the Numbers Series, in which the digit in each title is the number of dancers on stage — the newest work, 9, has nine.

Ten years is a real achievement for any privately run, full-time modern dance company in China. In some European countries a single city has more than a hundred full-time modern dance companies. In China the figure is in the single digits.

By the account of Tao Ye, a co-founder of the company and its artistic director, TAO Dance Theater, founded in 2008, is the only modern dance company in the world that lives on performance income alone.

TAO Dance Theater now has 10 full-time dancers. Daily rehearsals are run by rehearsal director Duan Ni and Tao Ye together, and there is also an administrative team and a technical team under company manager Wang Hao. In 2017 the company played 15 cities in China and abroad, 28 performances in all; this year the number will probably pass 20 as well.

On November 24 and 25, 2018, TAO Dance Theater gave its tenth-anniversary performances in the Grand Theater of the Beijing Tianqiao Performing Arts Center — the company's first work, Weight x3, and its newest, 9. Three days before the show, more than 80 percent of the tickets for November 24 had sold, many of them to the company's own fans.

TAO Dance Theater has a core of loyal audiences. At a post-show talk in Shanghai in September, one audience member asked about aging and death, prompted by the company's own documentary Duan Ni at 40. Others had seen Tao Ye act in the film Blue Sky Bones (《蓝色骨头》) and pressed him on why TAO Dance Theater shuts out everything that lies outside the body, and how he understands the relation between modern dance and emotion.

Ten years in, Tao Ye can feel the audience changing. "At the start they simply couldn't read it — 'what are you doing?' They still wanted you to tell them what it meant. I wouldn't call that sad, but it was a pretty basic level. Later, audiences began to volunteer what they felt on their own, and beyond that they could discuss how a piece of performance art is built."

Modern dance was born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A revolt against classical ballet, it prizes freedom and mostly refuses traditional narrative, which makes it more abstract and, for audiences used to watching a story, hard to read. TAO Dance Theater has managed to build a clear identity with its audience, perhaps because it has one core idea that is easy to remember: the body.

TAO Dance Theater's 4 and 5 together, with music by the folk singer Xiao He

"Tao Ye has a way of drawing you into his plain, meditative world. If you are willing, you will find that the body is a sacred place. In a sense, Tao Ye has completely remade a kind of performance through the passing of time and the repetition of movement. Through his persistence, we come to grasp the freedom of the flesh." That was how Gia Kourlas, dance critic at The New York Times, described TAO Dance Theater's performances in 2014.

Body, repetition, gravity — every one of TAO Dance Theater's core ideas comes from Tao Ye.

Tao Ye, 33 this year, is from Chongqing. When he was 12 his family noticed how supple his body was and sent him to study dance; he later tested into the Chongqing Dance School. There, a training system built on classical Chinese dance and folk dance gave him the physical foundation a dancer needs — and left him confused about what dance was for.

Tao Ye praises that basic training, but the way the work was presented troubled him, as it troubled many other dancers who later turned to modern dance. "That kind of traditional performing art confused me — laughing with total abandon, or grand tragic gestures. I'm not someone who loves expressing emotion. My head was full of question marks at the time; I felt my whole body had been stuffed with symbols, and I did whatever the teacher told me to do. Across four years of dance study at a vocational secondary school, one question actually opened up: what am I doing? Is this what dance is?"

The doubt stayed with him until, at 18, he joined the Jin Xing Dance Theatre in Shanghai. Tao Ye can still see his first look at the company's daily training: Jin Xing's dancers rehearsed then at the Shanghai Grand Theatre, sunlight pouring in through four huge skylights, the music inside long and lyrical. The dancers all lay easily on the white marley floor, soft and loose, moving slowly to unknot and wake their bodies.

That attention to the body became the theme running through Tao Ye's later work. As he sees it, the body is the vessel that carries life, and the process of moving stands for reproduction and expenditure, the finite and the infinite. Movement asks these questions and answers them at the same time. And the process of movement is itself shaped by repetition and gravity, which drain a dancer's strength, test a dancer's will, and challenge an audience's attention.

Practising day after day, Tao Ye kept turning over questions about the body, and once he felt "his own vessel was full" he needed to do something to settle them. In 2008 Tao Ye and Wang Hao, both core dancers at the Beijing Modern Dance Company, left it; Tao Ye's girlfriend Duan Ni came back to China from a top company abroad; and the three of them founded TAO Dance Theater together.

Before Duan Ni returned, Tao Ye had finished Zhong (《重》) and Chong (《重》), two of the three pieces in Weight x3, TAO Dance Theater's first work. After she came back from New York, he began making a 20-minute stick dance cut to fit her.

On September 5, 2009, TAO Dance Theater paid for its own premiere at the Dongfang Xianfeng Theater in Beijing and filled about 80 percent of the theater's more than 400 seats. The video artist Xiao Dong filmed the whole performance; the footage was later burned onto DVDs and handed to Alison Friedman, who passed them on to festival platforms abroad.

Friedman became TAO Dance Theater's bridge to the world outside China. An American who studied Chinese literature in college, she came to China in 2002 on an official program grant to spend a year researching Chinese dance, and later worked as production coordinator for the China festival at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the United States. In 2009 she began working with TAO Dance Theater. Ping Pong Productions, the international cultural-exchange outfit she runs, opened up overseas performance markets for the company and raised money for its later works.

In 2010 TAO Dance Theater gave its first performance abroad, in Amsterdam. In 2011 the company was invited to perform Weight x3 at New York City Center — the first time a Chinese modern dance company had reached a world-class stage of that kind.

As the Numbers Series accumulated after Weight x3, TAO Dance Theater also began to win some recognition at home. In 2013 Tao Ye took the "Fashion Dancer of the Year" award from the China Fashion Power List run by The Beijing News, and in 2015 the paper named him "Emerging Artist of the Year."

Survival was the hard part in the early years. While rehearsing Weight x3 they could not afford rehearsal space in Beijing and went as far as Zhuozhou, in Hebei province — five or six hours a day just travelling — because a gym of more than 100 square meters cost 5 yuan a day there.

In a 2012 interview with The New York Times, Friedman set out some of the difficulties facing Chinese modern dance companies: rent for venues is too high; corporate giving to the arts is minimal; unregistered dance companies cannot apply for government project support; some televised dance shows are so lavish that they leave ordinary audiences with a one-sided idea of the form; and not every company has a star dancer like Jin Xing, with the influence and box-office pull that brings.

On the question of government money, the choreographer Hou Ying explained in a 2017 interview: "The National Arts Fund can only go to creation and staging — you need a new project to apply for it. But the reality is that a company doesn't make new work every year, and it still has to survive, still needs basic things: housing, a rehearsal studio. And handing one project a large lump sum, which is how the National Arts Fund works, doesn't match how art works either. What art needs is not a large sum dropped on a few elites and stars; it is a large number of people getting support at different levels."

Tao Ye understands the rules of survival in this world, and from the start they tried to get more people to see the company perform. TAO Dance Theater's Sina blog was registered on February 19, 2008, to post performance information and records of events; later they moved on to Weibo and a WeChat official account, and built their own website.

"We care a great deal about keeping a record of every live show — photographs, video, close to 80 percent of it or more. Every event gets documented, and afterwards we write things up to sort the material out, then push it out through media outlets and through our own channels."

In the first three years the three founders had to do everything themselves: "Nobody supervises your creation or your rehearsal, you have to find your own space, and everything besides the dancing you handle yourself as well. Including our first commercial show — we did the publicity ourselves." Abroad, even though Ping Pong Productions had built links with foreign festivals and theaters, no producer handled the early communication for them and no one coordinated the performances: "We did our own translating, and ran our own stage lighting."

Weight x3 slowly made TAO Dance Theater's name, and older figures in the field gave them a hand. In 2010, with support from the director Lin Zhaohua, the company got rehearsal space at Beijing's Modern MOMA; in 2011 it moved into the artist Xiang Jing's studio in the Dongfeng Art District. In 2012 TAO Dance Theater moved into Beijing's 318 International Art Zone, and early this year it rebuilt and enlarged its rehearsal studio.

Today, besides its 10 full-time dancers, TAO Dance Theater has administrative and technical teams, which many dance companies do not. To stay alive, and to stay alive in good order, Tao Ye believes, every part of the operation has to be there; that is the foundation you build on.

Over these 10 years the three people who once danced Weight x3 on stage have changed roles: from dancers they have become the people who run the company. Tao Ye is artistic director and choreographer, responsible for making the work, and he is also the one who takes on outside lectures, conversations, post-show talks and interviews; Wang Hao is company manager and handles all of TAO Dance Theater's administration; Duan Ni is now rehearsal director, and of the three she is the only one who still goes on stage.

Their titles differ now, but on much of the work they still pull together as they did in the first three years: "Wang Hao takes the lead, and we all do it together." TAO Dance Theater is not a company that makes its publicity person rack their brains — the three founding dancers often look back on the past, talk about the difficulty of dancing a particular piece, even take part in documentary shoots. To them these are all ways of expressing something, no different from the dancing.

2013 may have been TAO Dance Theater's breakthrough with a wider public. That year they performed at the National Centre for the Performing Arts for the first time, no small thing for an independent company working in a niche form; Tao Ye was also invited to be the 81st speaker on the lecture platform Yixi. The next year Cui Jian's film Blue Sky Bones came out, with Tao Ye playing Sun Hong, a dancer in a military song-and-dance troupe; the lead was Yin Fang, then also a professional dancer.

In Blue Sky Bones, Tao Ye dances a modern-dance passage full of emotional force

With some name recognition, Tao Ye did have other options. He could have gone on acting in films the way Yin Fang has (Yin Fang's most recent is Operation Red Sea, the patriotic blockbuster released over Chinese New Year). Or he could have followed Jin Xing and covered the funding gaps for making and staging new work by judging dance shows, acting in plays, lecturing, and hosting a talk show, The Jin Xing Show.

Tao Ye did not. TAO Dance Theater's most frequent work outside its own field has instead been with fashion shows, which suits the temperament of the company and its founder. In 2015 Yohji Yamamoto's label staged its spring/summer show at Paris Fashion Week with the company's 6 running through the whole show from beginning to end; in 2016 Duan Ni shot a tenth-anniversary film for the fashion brand MO&CO, appearing alongside the singer Shang Wenjie; in 2018 Tao Ye walked a Hermès show at the Shipbuilding Pavilion in Shanghai. That is as far as it has gone.

Since Weight x3, every one of TAO Dance Theater's works has come with commissions from internationally known festivals or theaters — four or five of them, sometimes more. Tao Ye insists that no one hands him a theme; everything follows his own thinking.

His output is still strong. Since 2008 he has put out work at close to one piece a year: Weight x3, then 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

TAO Dance Theater's performance calendar now runs to 2020, and 2019 is full. On the bookings it already has, the company can just about feed itself — but that too rests on Tao Ye going on creating, and on the company's members staying.

At TAO Dance Theater a dancer needs roughly three years before they have something to express and contribute. "By contribution I mean the dancer has a strength of their own, an individual strength, and can release that energy into every part of the company. But it is often at exactly that critical point that a dancer chooses to leave."

"In the first year he tests into TAO Dance Theater, the pick of his graduating class, praised by his teachers. By the second year his classmates have bought cars and apartments, changed careers, started businesses, opened little shops of their own; some have been through several relationships and he hasn't had one. More or less, that's a shock," Tao Ye says. "Finding a dancer who is truly sincere is much harder than getting married."

The aging of a mature dancer is another problem. Duan Ni is 41 this year; she danced 5 at the September performance in Shanghai. Tao Ye says the dancers in 5 are relaxed and soft: "If you dance it well, if your state of mind can settle, you come off feeling like you've had a spa, like a full-body massage."

One audience member who knows the company well said of Duan Ni: "5 is no problem at all, but Weight x3 is harder."

Weight x3 holds three dances, and the hardest is the stick dance Tao Ye spent five months building for Duan Ni back then. Modern dance drains a dancer, and many modern dance works run about 15 to 20 minutes.

The 20-minute stick dance pushes at the limit of a dancer's stamina, and it is also tightly constrained in props, positioning, lighting and music. There is no room for a single mistake: the dancer has to stay clear-headed and in control of her body for the full 20 minutes.

Duan Ni last danced the stick dance at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2015, when she was 38. After her mother was diagnosed with cancer, she left the stage for a little over two years. When she came back at 40, she found that her energy and stamina had fallen off too far to carry the stick dance. She could still dance other pieces, but not Weight x3; after her return she took a new title — rehearsal director.

On the change from dancer to manager, Tao Ye feels all three of them have regrets about the process, but none of them regret it. "It is exactly because we were willing to try every role that the company has survived to now. Who doesn't feel regret watching young people while they themselves grow old? But the three of us are all still here at this moment, still facing the future together — nothing can replace that feeling."

Still, the work needs someone to dance it. TAO Dance Theater later brought in many dancers to learn the stick dance, but none of them stayed with it, and for a while Duan Ni and Tao Ye thought the piece might have no one to carry it on.

They did find a successor. At the tenth-anniversary performance at the Tianqiao Performing Arts Center, the stick dance from Weight x3 was danced by 23-year-old Zhang Qiaoqiao. She joined TAO Dance Theater in July last year, and what let her learn the piece came down to her obsessive, single-minded passion for dance.

In a documentary called Growth, Zhang Qiaoqiao's figure and Duan Ni's overlap as they dance the stick dance at the same time, Duan Ni pulling every movement apart to explain it and hand over the technique. In one shot Zhang Qiaoqiao is gasping for breath and Duan Ni applauds her: "That's the best you've danced it lately."

Tao Ye sees the first work, Weight x3, and the newest, 9, as a conversation between two ends — a look back at TAO Dance Theater's first decade, and a summing-up of it. But when the talk turns to the company's future, he sounds a little worried.

He notes that many people in China are still working for basic survival and have no wish to learn about modern dance as an art. China is not Europe or the United States, where foundations of all kinds, backed by government and business, provide steady support.

How can a company live better? Tao Ye says there are all sorts of ways; it depends on whether you are willing to compromise.

Even before VR and AR came into public view, plenty of people had approached TAO Dance Theater about working together, but Tao Ye did not think they had the expertise for that kind of runaway, technology-driven growth. After one workshop, company manager Wang Hao's phone rang off the hook with dance training institutions from around the country — there is enormous potential in teaching children or adults, even in psychological therapy — but that is not what TAO Dance Theater wants either.

On how to handle temptation and trade-offs, Tao Ye says there will certainly be compromises. In the next decade the Numbers Series will go on — there will be a 10 and an 11 — and they are now in a new round of recruiting dancers. Commercialization will be a new challenge. The one consolation is that the question of survival is already settled.

The cover image is a production photo from TAO Dance Theater's newest work, 9; the banner image is the performance poster for 9. In-text images courtesy of TAO Dance Theater.