自我介紹 Dance Artist

Made in Taiwan, active in America and quiet places. MFA. She has a deep love for dance and nurturing harmony. She has danced for Susan Marshall, Gesel Mason, Punchdrunk, and many brilliant artists. She was an original cast member of Sleep No More NYC; as well as a rehearsal director of SNM Shanghai. Most recently, she has toured with ANIKAYA to Palestine and African countries. Along with performing, teaching has been her sacred process of learning. She was a visiting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and an adjunct at U of California San Diego. She is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst, Yoga and Yoga Nidra Facilitator. She has bathed in contact improvisation, meditation and yoga since 2005 with occasional teaching and sharing with others. In her free time, she practices calligraphy, plays with voices, and makes bad arts. And she loves bananas. 

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Teaching Philosophy

I, me, we artists often struggle to secure and validate a place in academia and education, a place and space where we belong and where we are the recognized progenitors and creative scholars.  As such, our bodies – as the primary instrument and holder of the artistic knowledge, have power to influence, shape and change one’s reality and experiential knowing. I am passionate about using a practice of embodiment as a way to engage and inspire people who are often minoritized and marginalized. I believe in teaching dance as composing topography for healing the physical and ancestral traumas – the repetition of sweat, blood, feces, and urine are all included in the lived experience of the embodied practice of movement, and that is part of the process of decomposing landscapes of translation and transmutation. Through the practice of repetition, endurance, intensification and exhaustion are parts of the necessary aftermath. The process represents how time can be used through dance to experience the now and shift into altered realms of being – from the physical to the ethereal realms of time (i.e., the past, present, future, and the alternate fantasy).  

In addition, I often use the practice of cultural sharing in my teaching because it cultivates in students the use of imagination and story-telling.  Here, the students are asked to suspend their disbelief and begin to take agency of their own practices, values and cultural experiences. Ultimately, my hope is to allow space in the learning process to give the students permission to  take risks, make mistakes and even fail at times, in order to grow because education through mutual sharing and transformation is a time honored process.

Overall, my lived experiences inform my teaching processes.  Most significant to my work are the five elements of Chinese Philosophy and life force – gold or metal, wood, water, fire, earth or soil.  These five elements are constantly in dialogue to negotiate the dynamic balance of the life forces in my teaching processes, creative work, rapport with students and personal responsibility.  As such, in my teaching philosophy, I seek to deepen the students’ sense of responsibility for the environment and the physical presence that embraces all bodies and spirits – the life harmony.

Edited by Dr. Elgie G. Sherrod