Peiling Kao Dances Presents ONE BODY, FIVE DANCES, SIX PERSPECTIVES II

PEILING KAO DANCES present One Body, Five Dances, Six Perspectives II. The production addresses the postcolonial body in postmodern dance, featuring Kao as a solo dancer throughout.

Kao was born and raised in Taiwan. Her dance training was both postmodern and postcolonial. Since moving to the U.S. in 2007, she has been actively collaborating with other choreographers, creating dance works that address hybrid movement and the bicultural dancing body. In the process of making dance and learning other choreographers' dances, Kao questions how habituation and identity play out in movement, dance, and the human form. If a dancer is chosen to work with a choreographer, can this dancer's body be colonized by the choreographic intentions? If the dancing body is trained in modern/postmodern dance style, how is the postcolonial body identified on an individual level?

In order to examine her own process of adapting, absorbing, or resisting movement during the choreographic process, Kao commissioned five renowned male choreographers to each set a solo on her.

The dances are programmed as follows:

Pelehonuamea

Choreographed by Peter Rockford Espiritu

How Water Disappears

Choreographed by Shinichi Iova-Koga

hapon

Choreographed by Gerald Casel

The Sound Keeps Falling

Choreographed by Wen-Chung Lin

Island

choreographed by Keith Hennessy

Peiling Kao is a Taiwanese choreographer, dance educator, and performer. Since moving to the U.S. in 2007, she has been working with choreographers of different aesthetic

frameworks, collaborating with interdisciplinary artists, performing and teaching nationally and internationally, as well as presenting original work via her company PEILING KAO DANCES. In May 2010, she finished her MFA in Dance at Mills College and received an E.L Wiegand Foundation Award for excellence in performance and choreography.

Peiling is an Associate Professor of Dance at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research and creative interests are focused on movement improvisation, choreography, bicultural and hybrid movement, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Award (2018), a University of Hawai'i Junior Faculty Research Award (2018), and University of Hawai'i Office of Chancellor for Research Award (2017 & 2018). She also received a San Francisco Bay Area's Isadora Duncan Dance Awardsin 2012 and was nominated for another in 2013. She was a recipient of the Lo Man-Fei Dance Fund from Cloud Gate Foundation in Taiwan (2016) and the MAP fund in 2021.

For more information visit peilingkaodances.com.

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