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Chen Wu-kang was born and raised in Taiwan. He began studying dance at the age of twelve and graduated from the Taiwan University of Arts. In 2001, Wu-kang danced with Ballet Tech and Peridance and became the soloist. He started his long-term collaboration with choreographer Eliot Feld. He was also the guest dancer in Diamond Project of New York City Ballet in 2006. In 2004, he co-founded HORSE as an artistic director. Significant works include Velocity (2007), Bones (2008), and 2 Men (2012), which toured in Asia, the US, and Europe.

Wu-kang has also collaborated with artists in different fields, including Exhibition X Performance Successor (2011), and the curatorial project Dance X Sounds seasonal improvisation platform Primal Chaos. In 2016, he began an intercultural dance dialogue with Thai master Pichet Klunchun, Behalf, which premiered in 2018 and toured in 2019.

Meanwhile, Wu-kang also worked on the three-year project Choreographing Story. He directed The show must go on by Jérôme Bel at the Taipei Art Festival in 2019, and co-created as well as performed Dances for Wu-Kang Chen (2020), receiving the 2021 Taishin Performing Arts Award. Recent online streaming works Thank You So Much for Your Time (2019), Thank You For Staying Home (2020), and 14 (2021 Da:ns Festival, Esplanade, Singapore).

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Sun Ruey-horng is a video designer who is known for creating large-scale performative multimedia environments which interact with human perception, memories and uncanny experiences in our daily lives. He received the 2020 Lucille Lortel award for his projection design in The Headlands, produced by Lincoln Center Theater. His design works have been presented on Broadway, the Guggenheim Museum, Hong Kong Cultural Centre, La MaMa, LCT3, and National Theater Taipei, among others.

FreeSteps - Orogeny

Choreographer: SU Wei-chia
Performer: CHEN Pei-Yung
Visual Design: HORSE

The human body combines with large-scale heterogeneous materials to become organic subjects. They construct transient dynamic connections unique to the present moment, carving out textures of fleeting transformation.

FreeSteps - NiNi

Choreography by SU Wei-chia.

FreeSteps - NiNi is SU’s solo work for unconventional space at the sixth year of his 10-years FreerSteps project, in which the performance takes place out of the theater and comes to people in their daily life. The audience encounters the dancer under a streetlamp in the city, where the surrounding, lighting, landscape, as well as themselves become materials for the creation.

In FreeSteps – NiNi, the dancer sets dance free from fixed imagination, expectations and assumptions. The body is frequently angular while the dancer remains in rotative as oasis of calm, oblivious to the busy city surroundings. The physicality of variation and rotation flowing through lights and shadows contribute to shape the vividly live body sculpture.

BEHALF

Choreography by Pichet KLUNCHUN and CHEN Wu-Kang.

BEHALF is a collaboration between 2 contemporary Asian male choreographers who “dis/close” themselves: to each other and to the spectator. Taking equal turns on stage, they reveal personal portraits in pure movement. These form short intriguing snapshots on power and iconography in fatherhood, heritage and self-making. One seeks to embrace patrimony; the other tries to reform it.