余彥芳
YU Yen-Fang /
Yu Yen-Fang is a Taiwanese independent dancer and performer who is involved in choreography, teaching, and curation. Her work spans Europe, the United States, China, and Taiwan.
Born and raised in Zhongli, a Hakka region in Taiwan, her father is Hakka, and her mother is Minnan. Yu Yen-Fang began her dance journey at a young age and has since followed her passion across the globe, including in Europe, the United States, and China.
Yu Yen-Fang has long focused on developing her artistic language in Taiwan, concentrating on contemporary social issues. Her creations use the body as a medium, expanding the traditional understanding of dance to include profound reflections on individuals and society. Her work internalizes and projects stories from this land and personal life experiences, transforming internal feelings into comprehensible artistic expressions and creating dialogue spaces with the broader public.
Yu Yen-Fang began her dance training in folk dance and ballet. At nineteen, she encountered postmodern dance and contact improvisation under Professor Ku Ming-Shen and joined Ku & Dancers, which laid the foundation for her artistic expression and philosophical thinking. During college, she explored dance choreography and graduated with a double major in performance and choreography. She later earned a full scholarship to pursue a Master of Fine Arts at Ohio University, studying under Bebe Miller and Victoria Uris. While in graduate school, she continued to create and worked as a graduate assistant in Bebe Miller’s creative process.
After graduation, she joined Bebe Miller Company, performing alongside legendary American dancers such as Bebe Miller, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Angie Hauser, Cynthia Oliver, and Kristina Isabelle, in the work Necessary Beauty, touring across significant U.S. theaters. During the same period, she lived in New York. She participated in various creative and performance projects at venues like Judson Memorial Church Theater, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, the Kumble Theater at Long Island University, the American Dance Festival, and the Lincoln Center rehearsal studios. In 2011, her work From Here…To the End of the Rainbow was invited to perform at the Japan Society in the United States, receiving praise from Financial Times dance critic Apollinaire Scherr as “most startling and suggestive” and “how liquid and iridescent love feels.” In 2010, she joined Germany’s Kassel Theater as a guest performer.
Returning to Taiwan in 2011, she ended her overseas journey and delved into various roles, including dancer, actor, creator, project initiator, platform lecturer, theater movement designer, and creative companion. She deeply engages with the different situations and challenges that Taiwan offers.
In 2013, as an independent dancer, Yu Yen-Fang launched the “Muo-Muo Project,” assembling a team to train and create with young theater and dance performers and cross-disciplinary teams, using body language combined with theater to explore local political and cultural issues. The project’s performances have ranged from underground markets to capital theaters, from local to international stages. In 2017, facing a critical turning point for the “Muo-Muo Project,” Yu Yen-Fang decided to deconstruct and reinterpret five years of dance research into a more accessible and understandable dance form. Together with Hu Ya-Ting and Chiu Mei-Hen, she co-founded Muo-Muo Workshops, using improvisational dance and contact improvisation to engage in social dialogue, with the hope that artistic action can enhance and improve people’s quality of life. Since 2017, the Muo-Muo Workshops have reached thousands of people across Taiwan, teaching improvisation dance to both professional dancers and novices alike. Yu Yen-Fang has also taught at Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and in Beijing, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and Groningen, Netherlands. She serves as a choreographic companion and platform mentor at various dance and circus platforms across Taiwan, helping to nurture new creators by sharing creative tools and experiences.
In 2019, she premiered her solo work Propositions on Disappearance III, a deeply moving piece in which Yu Yen-Fang, as a dancer, reminisces about her father, a skilled engraver. The work revisits her father’s daily movements through a daughter’s eyes, using family history, bodily transformation, spoken word, theatrical play, and abstract dance to carve out the image of a Hakka man who grew up in post-war Taiwan. This work, showcasing Yu Yen-Fang’s years of performance art experience, is both lighthearted and profound, resonating deeply with Taiwanese audiences. It was recognized as a finalist for the 2019 Taishin Arts Award and has since been restaged and toured at HORSE Dance Theatre (New Taipei City) and National Taichung Theater. It has also been selected for the 2024 Internationale Tanzmesse NRW in Düsseldorf, Germany, where it will be presented in late August.
近期重要演出及創作
- 2019
- Co-production with Canada and Spain, real-time online performance Intersection theatrical performance
- Prague Quadrennial, interactive performance piece Lift Me Up co-creator/performer
- Taishin Arts Award finalist, solo work Propositions on Disappearance III creator/performer
- 2021
- 14 (transnational live streaming), live dance streamer
- National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts Five-Country Residency Program, dance documentary Do You Dance? artist
- Singapore Esplanade x National Taichung Theater, dance documentary Transmission: Beginning Step into Walk/Dance Project project initiator/creator/performer
- 2022
- National Theater & Concert Hall’s Artquake In Autumn Festival, Super Mom’s Club creator
- 2023
- Taipei Arts Festival, Temporary Title by Xavier Le Roy/Scarlet Yu puperformer
- 2024
- Singapore Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts, Where I Dance performer
- National Taichung Theater’s NTT ARTS Nova, Propositions on Disappearance III creator/performer
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, exhibition Interested Persons, work Body Description creator