YEH Ming-Hwa

Curatorial Perspective

In 2020, Yeh Ming-Hwa launched the project, SHE, in which she revisits some of the female icons in world dance history, in parallel with her own reflections as a dancer and choreographer growing up in Taiwan. This ongoing project intersects with women whose dance careers span different epochs, including prima ballerina assoluta, Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991), the first Chinese dancer to receive a dance education in Europe, Yu Rong-Ling (1889-1973), and celebrated Taiwanese dancer Lo Man-Fei (1955-2006). Through this project, Yeh reviews her own training as a professional dancer, as well as the indirect influences from international and domestic social situations on her training. In this work, a series of interwoven gestures of “looking and being looked at” serves as a metaphor for the multilayered interrogation of the gaze/the hierarchy of power relation embodied by this performance. With her experiences drawn from her personal dance career, Yeh Ming-Hwa strings together bodily lineages of crucial choreographers in dance history, and further investigates dialectically a wider context of cultural history and the history of the body. Through interlacing dance movements, objects, reading and images, she unveils three important and exciting aspects: 1. In terms of content, the choreographer integrates personal and Western socio-cultural contexts, as well as the memories of Western and Taiwanese dance, to carry a historical depth into personal experiences, which allows her to further enrich the Taiwanese history of the body; 2. With regard to dance techniques, the choreographer/dancer demonstrates how to transform mesmerizing dance movements into contemporary choreographic elements, while exploring the idea of “technics as memory” put forth by Bernard Stiegler; 3. Concerning the form, through the multilayered referencing of looking, being looked at, and gazing, the work traverses different times and spaces in a cinematic way, and unfolds a new imagination of theatrical performance. Such multilayered, private performance of intimacy represents the artist’s reflection on and tribute to female choreographers, as the title SHE suggests. With her work, Yeh has inscribed a long overlooked aspect about women for the history of Taiwan.

Creation Description

SHE is an ongoing project by solo artist Yeh Ming-Hwa in which she revisits some of the female icons in world dance history, in parallel with her own reflections as a dancer and choreographer growing up in Taiwan. This year’s SHE_O.S. intersects with women whose dance careers span different epochs, including prima ballerina assoluta Margot Fonteyn and the first Chinese dancer to receive a dance education in Europe Yu Rong-Ling. The title of this work refers to non-sync sound formats in film, which informs the exploration of the discrepancies between image and sound, action and commentary. How much can dance be described, interpreted, and passed on through language? How much is left “off-screen?”