For the seventh year in his decade-long choreography project, SU Wei-chia has once again explored out the distinctive contours of the NTT. In FreeSteps AR Yours, audiences use their tablets or smartphones as they walk freely within various spaces in the venue, while using augmented reality technology to see different dimensions of the dance.

In this work, SU continues his interest in exploring the body. With refined physicality and dance journey of six acclaimed Taiwanese dancers, the body landscape is delineated along selected curvatures in the NTT, each offering a different perspective of the dancers. With the help of digital technology, time and space are no longer limits, allowing the audience to freely traverse time and distance, spectating and performance.

Choreographer / SU Wei-chia

Born in Kaohsiung, SU Wei-chia was inspired by Prof. WU Su-fen at the National Taiwan Academy of Arts. In 2004, he co-founded the HORSE Dance Theater. His numerous choreographies and collaborations include the group-created work Velocity, a winner of the 6th Taishin Arts Awards, and the autobiographical 2 Men, a collaboration with CHEN Wu-kang, and the 1st prize winner and Audience's Choice Award of the 2013 Kurt-Jooss-Preis. His ongoing FreeSteps project, launched in 2013, explores the relationship between contours, movements, characters, rhythm, music, and light; his performance at Les Hivernales - CDCN d'Avignon was described as "a succession of shocks that drive the imagination into obscure and delicious depths."
 

Dancer / CHEN Wu-kang

CHEN Wu-kang started dancing at the age of twelve. From 2001 to 2013, he was a dancer at Feld's Ballet Tech and Peridance and collaborated with choreographer Eliot Feld as a solo dancer. In 2004, he co-founded the HORSE Dance Theater and has been the theater’s artistic director ever since. He presented BEHALF in 2018. In the same year, he began to work on a three-year project Rama's House with Thai choreographer Pichet Klunchun, which is supported by the National Culture and Arts Foundation.

Dancer / CHOU Shu-yi

CHOU Shu-yi uses dance to examine his own life as well as all visible and invisible social phenomena, and creates works in theatrical spaces and day-to-day environments. In 2004, he co-founded the dance company, HORSE, with CHEN Wu-kang and SU Wei-chia. Later, CHOU founded ‘Shu-Yi & Dancers’ to establish connections between arts and society in 2011. In recent years, he has been focusing on exploring the language of the Asian body and making art in different cities.

Dancer / CHANG Chien-ming

CHANG Chien-ming was an early member of Cloud Gate 2 and has been living abroad since 2007. From 2007 to 2009, He was a dancer of Stadttheater Bern (Konzert Theater Bern). He is currently a dancer of the Hofesh Shechter Company in the United Kingdom and the rehearsal director of Hofesh Shechter II.

Dancer / LEE Yin-ying

LEE Yin-ying is a dance performer. She was a former dancer at Cloud Gate 2 where she was a part of numerous productions. She has also collaborated with other dance groups and dancers such as the Century Contemporary Dance Company, Lin HH Dance, SU Wei-chia, and CHOU Shu-yi. In 2019 she received a grant from the National Culture and Arts Foundation to pick up Butoh dance in Tokyo.

Dancer / WU Meng-ke

Taichung-born WU Meng-ke entered the Nederlands Dans Theatre (NDT) in 2010 and was promoted to the First Group three years later, becoming the first dancer in Taiwan to earn a spot in this top-tier and internationally acclaimed dance group. She received the Top Dancer Award and Best Audience Voting Award at the International Solo-Dance-Theatre Festival Stuttgart, Germany. The Times described WU as an "outstanding and excellent” dancer. She also won the Outstanding Female Dancer Award in the European Dance Magazine Dance Critics Awards.

Dancer / FANG Yu-ting

Born in Kaohsiung and graduated from the Dance Department of National Taiwan University of Arts, FANG Yu-ting joined Cloud Gate shortly after her graduation. She has been a dancer and rehearsal director in HORSE since 2015 and is currently one of the main dancers in the productions that are part of SU Wei-chia's FreeSteps series. She is also the solo dancer in FreeSteps–NiNi in 2019.

AR Excutive Team／GELLYBOMB GAMES

Gellybomb Games is a leading Taiwanese extended reality (XR) studio, providing customized XR designs and content for businesses. Their game Eleanor of Ayer received international acclaim for its use of augmented reality, and received the Best AR Experience Award at the first Vision VR/AR Summit Award.
 

Panoramic Synchronization Photography / Solid Memory

Solid Memory is the Taiwan's first photogrammetry company, specializing in ultra-high resolution 3D scanning. Using 100 synchronized DSLR cameras in a 360º setup, they take an ultra-fine snapshot in one second so detailed that skin pores can be seen. Their greatest advantage is color accuracy, preserving the material details of scanned objects.

Consultant / Escher TSAI

Escher TSAI is the creative director of Dimension Plus and the production supervisor of 3x3x6 Taiwan Pavilion in the 58th Venice Biennale. Dimension Plus, a new media arts creative team founded by Escher TSAI (Taiwan) and Keith LAM (Hong Kong) in 2009, focuses on art and technology. Their projects focus on new media-embedded spaces and cross-discipline interactive designs that introduce new media arts into the industry. These creative works enhance audience experience by allowing the audience to touch and interact with the space and the artwork. Dimension Plus’ creations have been showcased at various settings, including exposition halls, exhibition venues, art festivals in various cities and countries, and the team has also received numerous international awards including the German Design Award 2018, Gold Award of Macau Design Biennial 2018, Gold Award of Hong Kong DFA Design for Asia Awards 2018, Best Design of Taiwan Golden Pin Design Award 2018, Gold Award of DFAA 2013 (Design for Asia Award 2013) and Asia Digital Art Award 2012 in Japan. In 2013, the company began to venture into performing arts and the team now runs the Taiwan Performing Arts and Technology Center.

Curation Team / HORSE

Founded in 2004, HORSE has established a distinctive profile with precise physical movements and their boundless creativity. In 2008, Velocity won the Taishin Arts Award, a prestigious arts award in Taiwan. In 2013, 2 Men won the 1st prize and Audience’s Choice Award in Kurt Jooss Preis, PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany. In recent years, CHEN Wu-kang, the artistic director, and SU Wei-chia, the general director, have developed their unique art praxis. They continue to advance the company and lead their dancers towards new possibilities during this period of metamorphism in the Taiwanese contemporary dance scene. HORSE also endeavors to participate in and organize international collaborations, outreach programs, and curatorial projects. The practices include the platform Primal Chaos Dance x Sounds Improvisation and Back to the moment Dancing Talking Bar, a dance cinema in which creators and critics share and interact in real time, among other projects.

Graphic Design / LEE Shiun-huan

LEE is a video and theater director and graphic designer of Taiwanese indigenous descent. He assumed the pseudonym LEE Shiun-huan after being inspired by a Chinese martial arts novel. Trained in theater, LEE focused on producing and directing stage plays under his aboriginal name from 2004 to 2008. Since 2010, he has switched his focus from stage creation to video creation. Being a director of commercial short films and documentaries, he received the Outstanding Film Award in the Taipei Golden Eagle Micro-Movie Festival. He has long been involved in the key visual design for Taiwanese performing arts groups, theater festivals as well as activities conducted in art and performance spaces, and was contracted as the key visual designer for a concert held in the Presidential Office Building. LEE’s visual creations are inspired by Wolfgang Weingart’s minimalist aesthetics. He joked that the nourishment given to him by the theater is what allowed him to build a career in graphic design. For him, theatrical experience and practice nurture creativity, graphic design is the pursuit of aesthetics and composition, and video directing serves as a window for observation and self-reflection.

Sound Design / One Litre Sound – HUNG Yu-wen, Lisa Chi-hsia LAI

HUNG Yu-wen is a Taiwanese percussionist. She received her percussion degree from the Lyon CNSMD, France. During her six years in France, she often collaborated with performers from different art disciplines such as dance and theater. Her works include the percussion-dance production Neverland, which was later supported by the National Culture and Arts Foundation in Taiwan and nominated for the Taishin Arts Award in 2013. She held a solo recital in 2014 titled Monologue at the Experimental Theater, National Theater and Concert Hall (NTCH, Taiwan). In the same year, she also participated in NTCH’s Innovation Series. As a percussionist, HUNG has collaborated on multiple occasions with dance groups like HORSE and Company Shang-Chi Sun. She is also interested in pursuing further cross-disciplinary projects in the hope of promoting deeper exchanges among musicians and artists.

As a sound artist and percussionist, Lisa Chi-hsia LAI is dedicated to the exploration of percussion performance combined with media technology. Her works focus on the convergence of technology and performance. She is active as a performer and sound artist, and has performed throughout Europe, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan. Her artistic journey began in piano and percussion in Taiwan and continued later in Australia where she completed BMus in Percussion Music Performance and MPhil in New Media Arts at the Australian National University. Afterwards, she went to Helsinki and Berlin to hone her skills in sound art and music design. Apart from her artistic activities, she has also presented her research at international academic conferences such as NIME '09-’13, SMC '09, ACMC '08 '10, ICMI’11 and AudioMostly’12. She currently resides in Taipei, and is working as a sound artist, performer, music teacher, and experimental musical instrument designer.

Producer / HUANG Wen

Choreographer and Concept / SU Wei-chia

Dancers / CHEN Wu-kang, CHOU Shu-yi, CHANG Chien-ming, LEE Yin-ying, WU Meng-ke, FANG Yu-ting

Consultant / Escher TSAI

AR Executive team / GELLYBOMB GAMES

Panoramic Synchronization Photography / Solid Memory

Graphic Design / LEE Shiun-huan

Sound Design / One Litre Sound HUNG Yu-wen, LAI Chi-hsia Lisa

Recording and Post-production / One Litre Sound LAI Chi-hsia Lisa

Production Manager / YANG Jung

Main Visual Photography / CHEN Wei-sheng

Main Visual Post-production / CHIEN Ching-tzu