The Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) has partnered with Critical Path and the Cultural Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney, Australia, to co-organise the 2022-2024 Taiwan and Australia Choreography Exchange Program. This program supports artists from Sydney and Taiwan with a background in choreography or digital art.

This program offers choreographers (leveraging digital apparatus) or digital artists (leveraging choreography) the opportunity to deepen their practice, initiate collaborations, and lay foundations for future work.

Choreographic focused artists are particularly well placed to interrogate the fallout of the digital condition on the body, togetherness, and community. It is not technological breakthrough alone but the cultural innovation leveraging these new possibilities that shape the world.

Choreography is therefore advanced through this partnership by considered and playful mis-use of the tools of our time. It’s not to replace but to expand the body, to augment our reach and ability to connect, to deepen discourse through curiosity, to re-enchant digital apparatus, and to rigorously interrogate “digital” as our dominant cultural metaphor, since even a “digital future” will also be a physical one.

Digital Enchantment Lab

This one-week lab supports dancers and choreographers who leverage digital affordances in their work to more deeply interrogate digital creation and experimentation within a choreographic agenda. It will also extend to discussions of data sovereignty, cultural sensitivity, and the many unique considerations of the digital context.

Mentor:

Linda DEMENT has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, performative, textual and virtual dealing with bodies and technologies, code and flesh, dramas of the corporeal and programmed non-human activity.

Artists working in Taiwan:

Kai-yu LIN is an artist and researcher working with the intersection between contemporary dance and physics. She has been researching on intersections between the notions of visualizing from atoms to the universe: the scale of the universe and how human perception fit in. She is fascinated by dismantling/transforming the paradigmatic methodology between dance and science and opposes the binary opposition between science and art.

Ming-chieh LEE is an independent choreographer born in 1989 in Taiwan. Her recent artworks are focusing on the phenomenon of “Nomadicity of current generation” that people long for moving and yet search for sense of security in it at the same time. She usually focuses on the dynamic of body, objects and things as the main mediums for her research related to memory and time, and further discusses the flowing performativity of body and space.

Artists working in Australia:

Leo TSAO (he/him) is a Taiwanese Australian artist working predominantly with film and movement. Through practice as research methodology, his work is experimental and open ended. He often brings together disparate and unlikely disciplines and collaborators through formal explorations to rupture heteronormativity, cisgenderism and whiteness to create new modes of perception and possibilities.

Wendy YU is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersections of dance and urban media art. Utilizing dance and computer systems, she designs interactive works and builds large-scale immersive experiences to public spaces. She also elevates forms of dance such as breakdancing, which has typically been segregated to the streets, to the contemporary abstract art landscape.

Choreographic Expansion Lab

This one-week lab is catered towards digital artists who collaborate with dancers or who incorporate choreography in their work. It will support artists to expand their choreographic vocabulary and work more discerningly when leveraging dance in digital environments.

Mentor:

Eisa JOCSON exposes body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the unique socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move—be it social mobility or movement out of Philippines through migrant work. In all her creations—from pole to macho dancing and hostess to Disney princess studies—capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into spatial geographies.

Artists working in Taiwan:

Zi-ping TIAN focuses mainly on the reflection towards the technical production and media era, and also attempts to achieve the multi-perspective artwork through the creative process. TIAN shifts between roles of audiovisual technician, visual designer, and executive producer of new media devices at exhibition and theatre.

Jia-hua ZHAN was born in Hsinchu in 1987. Her work includes new media projects, videos, interactive installations, and interactive performances. She has won numerous international awards and specializes in combining visual art and performing art to explore the relationships between human beings, technology, and media forming a unique visual database of body imagery.

Artists working in Australia:

Riana HEAD-TOUSSAINT is an interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Her work often crosses traditional artform boundaries, and exists in online and offline spaces. Her choreographic practice is deeply informed and influenced by her movement language and embodied-experience as a wheelchair-user, and her self-taught/DIY artistic background and production methodologies. She makes both site-responsive, iterative work and more discrete projects; and her work often involves self-performance, film and sound design. She creates works that interrogate entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking; and advocate for social change. She is also a lawyer, curator and DJ.

Roslyn ORLANDO is a multidisciplinary artist working across live performance, video, text and experimental music. She is interested in the ways new technologies produce language, communication and meaning. Her work explores how these networked systems infiltrate, co-opt and disrupt our ontologies, emotional transmissions and experiences of time, memory, death, desire, friendship and other socially formed cognitions.