Chia-Ying Kao 高嘉瑩
Chia-Ying Kao is a Taiwanese choreographer, performer and teacher based in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College in 2012 and is the founder of Chia-Ying Kao dance. She has presented work and taught modern dance, Chinese folk dance, contemporary, composition, and improvisation internationally. She continues exploring multiculturalism with artists and community collaborators.
As an Taiwanese artist who works in the medium of dance relentlessly looking for narrative and symbolism within the moving bodies, her long term goals are to establish an effective cross-cultural and interdisciplinary practice marked by community relevance and involvement. Ms. Kao' personal training and performances in Chinese folk dances, Chinese dance, Chinese opera, ballet, modern and post-modern dance have influenced and formed the full scope and the complexity of her artistic vocabulary. The range of her influences is not confined to the dance arena: from Joan Miro’s surrealism and imagery to Wong Kar-Wai's aesthetic marked by a love for shadows and an obsession for retro nostalgia, she naturally draws from many artistic father figures. Merce Cunningham-John Cage's radical concept of employing chance procedure in choreography is also extremely important to her and has formed her deeply over time and affects her daily practice.
Ms. Kao has collaborated and performed with Sara Rudner, Yvonne Rainer, Bill T. Jones, Asian-American Cultural Circle of Unity and Hou Ying Dance Theater. Her work has been commissioned by the American Dance Festival, Chen Dance Center, Topaz Arts, Asian-American Cultural, Triskelion Arts, Broward College, Tribeca Film Festival, Manhattan's Union Square for a dance installation, Roulette NYC and Hualien Cultural Arts in Taiwan, among others. She was invited to the International Choreographer's Dance Residency at American Dance Festival, Henan 2012 and the International Choreographer's Dance Residency at American Dance Festival, Durham, NC 2013. She was the Topaz Arts AIR for 2012-2013, and participated in an ICR at TanzART, Germany in June 2019. Ms. Kao was the recipient of a Community Arts Grants Award from Brooklyn Arts Council and an Emergency Grant from Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2014 to develop her work "Where Your Voices Are". Her project "The Nows" performed at the Noel S. Ruiz Theater, Long Island in 2018, was generously supported by a Suffolk County Cultural Competitive Grant through Asian-American Cultural Circle of Unity. Her work "Out of A Landscape" has received Emergency Grant from Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2019 at Kunstinitiutive Im Friese- KunstBUS, Germany. Ms. Kao was the recipient of Topaz Arts AAPI Dance Residency in 2022.
In her work, she tries to address the questions that are urgent and relevant to her as they relate to cultural diversity and/or to current policies and practices in art making, with a focus on barriers to access, modes of spectatorship and how the very ideas of ‘audience’ and ‘viewer’ can be of inspiration to a dance: how can a dance work raise awareness on the challenges facing Asian-Americans today? How can we juxtapose extreme realism with abstraction, hoping that a sense of poetry will emerge from such juxtaposition? Her work aims to create imaginary worlds that build tension, juxtaposing socio-political images with abstraction, putting them on display to captivate a variety of audiences. She has been discovering narrative elements, new ways embodying ideas of human emotion, managed to transpose imaginative states into compositional structures set in time and space, and the questions of how to bring the real bodies in a cross-cultural setting into familiar and unfamiliar states of emotion: this, in a nutshell, could be a description of her trajectory. In her experimentation, Ms. Kao aims to find a platform that will allow the audience to fully engage with her imaginative world.
高嘉瑩 Chia-Ying Kao 出生於台灣花蓮，是道道地地的花蓮囝仔。2012年畢業於美國莎拉勞倫斯學院舞蹈系碩士。這是一所專門培育舞蹈教育家、編舞家、職業舞者的指標性學院。目前任職於紐約Nassau Community College 大學舞蹈戲劇系老師，同時聘任於 Brooklyn Arts Concil、City Lore、Dancewave、Metro Kinds 和 Preschool of America 等等學校的客席舞蹈藝術家。 2012年於紐約創立了高嘉瑩舞蹈團至今已邁入第十年，在當地享有盛譽。其作品創作非常多元，透過本身於台灣、美國生活的長時間體驗，結合東方與西方、傳統文化與當代文化，融入身體語彙為創作靈感，開發出突破性、啟發式的舞蹈藝術。深入研究作品後，不難發現，她在教學過程中利用提問激發學生的獨立思考，增強學生在創造性的探索和分析能力，在潛移默化中促使學生能夠找到自己的舞蹈專屬技巧和特色，呈現出更多令人驚艷的舞蹈運動方式。舞蹈亦是藝術，透過舞蹈亦能開發多種不同領域的藝術，如:音樂、影像和作畫，皆需具有天馬行空的想像能力。身為一個多文化的台灣舞蹈藝術家,她的藝術使命是開發突破性的舞蹈創作,融合了東方和西方的哲學、美學觀點與舞蹈形式,提高個人和社會的意識,尤其是跨文化. 她的目標是透過作品多元和多樣化的藝術風格概念,從個人延伸到群體、社會及國際.
As an Taiwanese artist who works in the medium of dance relentlessly looking for narrative and symbolism within the moving bodies, her long term goals are to establish an effective cross-cultural and interdisciplinary practice marked by community relevance and involvement. Ms. Kao' personal training and performances in Chinese folk dances, Chinese dance, Chinese opera, ballet, modern and post-modern dance have influenced and formed the full scope and the complexity of her artistic vocabulary. The range of her influences is not confined to the dance arena: from Joan Miro’s surrealism and imagery to Wong Kar-Wai's aesthetic marked by a love for shadows and an obsession for retro nostalgia, she naturally draws from many artistic father figures. Merce Cunningham-John Cage's radical concept of employing chance procedure in choreography is also extremely important to her and has formed her deeply over time and affects her daily practice.
Ms. Kao has collaborated and performed with Sara Rudner, Yvonne Rainer, Bill T. Jones, Asian-American Cultural Circle of Unity and Hou Ying Dance Theater. Her work has been commissioned by the American Dance Festival, Chen Dance Center, Topaz Arts, Asian-American Cultural, Triskelion Arts, Broward College, Tribeca Film Festival, Manhattan's Union Square for a dance installation, Roulette NYC and Hualien Cultural Arts in Taiwan, among others. She was invited to the International Choreographer's Dance Residency at American Dance Festival, Henan 2012 and the International Choreographer's Dance Residency at American Dance Festival, Durham, NC 2013. She was the Topaz Arts AIR for 2012-2013, and participated in an ICR at TanzART, Germany in June 2019. Ms. Kao was the recipient of a Community Arts Grants Award from Brooklyn Arts Council and an Emergency Grant from Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2014 to develop her work "Where Your Voices Are". Her project "The Nows" performed at the Noel S. Ruiz Theater, Long Island in 2018, was generously supported by a Suffolk County Cultural Competitive Grant through Asian-American Cultural Circle of Unity. Her work "Out of A Landscape" has received Emergency Grant from Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2019 at Kunstinitiutive Im Friese- KunstBUS, Germany. Ms. Kao was the recipient of Topaz Arts AAPI Dance Residency in 2022.
In her work, she tries to address the questions that are urgent and relevant to her as they relate to cultural diversity and/or to current policies and practices in art making, with a focus on barriers to access, modes of spectatorship and how the very ideas of ‘audience’ and ‘viewer’ can be of inspiration to a dance: how can a dance work raise awareness on the challenges facing Asian-Americans today? How can we juxtapose extreme realism with abstraction, hoping that a sense of poetry will emerge from such juxtaposition? Her work aims to create imaginary worlds that build tension, juxtaposing socio-political images with abstraction, putting them on display to captivate a variety of audiences. She has been discovering narrative elements, new ways embodying ideas of human emotion, managed to transpose imaginative states into compositional structures set in time and space, and the questions of how to bring the real bodies in a cross-cultural setting into familiar and unfamiliar states of emotion: this, in a nutshell, could be a description of her trajectory. In her experimentation, Ms. Kao aims to find a platform that will allow the audience to fully engage with her imaginative world.
高嘉瑩 Chia-Ying Kao 出生於台灣花蓮，是道道地地的花蓮囝仔。2012年畢業於美國莎拉勞倫斯學院舞蹈系碩士。這是一所專門培育舞蹈教育家、編舞家、職業舞者的指標性學院。目前任職於紐約Nassau Community College 大學舞蹈戲劇系老師，同時聘任於 Brooklyn Arts Concil、City Lore、Dancewave、Metro Kinds 和 Preschool of America 等等學校的客席舞蹈藝術家。 2012年於紐約創立了高嘉瑩舞蹈團至今已邁入第十年，在當地享有盛譽。其作品創作非常多元，透過本身於台灣、美國生活的長時間體驗，結合東方與西方、傳統文化與當代文化，融入身體語彙為創作靈感，開發出突破性、啟發式的舞蹈藝術。深入研究作品後，不難發現，她在教學過程中利用提問激發學生的獨立思考，增強學生在創造性的探索和分析能力，在潛移默化中促使學生能夠找到自己的舞蹈專屬技巧和特色，呈現出更多令人驚艷的舞蹈運動方式。舞蹈亦是藝術，透過舞蹈亦能開發多種不同領域的藝術，如:音樂、影像和作畫，皆需具有天馬行空的想像能力。身為一個多文化的台灣舞蹈藝術家,她的藝術使命是開發突破性的舞蹈創作,融合了東方和西方的哲學、美學觀點與舞蹈形式,提高個人和社會的意識,尤其是跨文化. 她的目標是透過作品多元和多樣化的藝術風格概念,從個人延伸到群體、社會及國際.