Yue Yin enthuses the dancer to try. She implores us to use each limb simultaneously, at its full capacity; for this challenge we thank her. 

From 4:30 to 6:20 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday in the Hearst Theatre, a cast of thirteen gathers in a circle around her assistant, Sarah Allen, to follow a series of repetitive movements in a deep plie. Bending and stretching and bending our legs while methodically adding in our arms. It sounds like Zumba but it looks much better; this is called FoCo. I have never been stronger in my life.

After warm-up, Yin takes the stage, teaching us choreography from her work Ripple, which premiered in 2020. The pre-made choreography does not ask but requires the dancer to employ dynamics to be executed correctly. Yin turns around herself, jumps, stretches, all while maintaining a grounded position; her knees bent, she rarely succeeds 5 feet. 

Occasionally she shocks us, instantaneously producing choreography in front of us of the same caliber to what has already been performed. And that’s it. The movement often goes unedited. Her equivalent of word vomit is ready for publication. She told me that’s just how she works. If she prepared choreography she would simply forget it before teaching it.    

One of the first times Yin choreographed in rehearsal, she was trying to find the correct wording to explain the movement so that the cast and our bodies might understand. Attempting to grasp our language of dance, Yin raised the question of what traditional dance meant to us. What is the relative baseline of dance across culture? For us dancers in the room, predominantly born and raised in the United States, the answer was clear: ballet. She did not give her tradition, but instead, utilized balletic terminology so that we might better understand the qualities she wanted from us. 

But her question implied she might have a different answer. I asked what classical dance meant to her. Yin answered: Chinese classical and folk dance, going on to describe what Chinese classical dance looks like: “[there are] a lot of ballet techniques in Chinese dance, but then it has a little bit more upper body… So, [the] footwork [is] very much like ballet,” but has its own unique character. She mentioned the forms traditional Chinese dance draws from, including martial arts. The Shen Yun Dance Company supports this sentiment, remarking the movement transformed from militant technique into a performance medium seen at banquets and festivities dating back 4,000 years, eventually shaping what is classical Chinese dance today. In Mandarin, the characters for dance (舞) and martial arts (武) are even pronounced the same. The overlap can be seen in shared postures and stances. Yin’s dance “base” and “tradition” that one can build upon is inherently different from what many of us in the United States study. 

But how does a dance form become the tradition? Much like ballet in Europe and the United States, Chinese Folk and Traditional dance is institutionalized, both taking their origins from entertainment in imperial courts and then being solidified as genres through the legacy of education. Yin learned Folk and Traditional Chinese dance at the Shanghai Dance Academy. Her school was a boarding school, so she was only able to go home once a semester, a hard ask for a child no more than 14. Yin described her youth in the school as insane. 

I assumed that while spending all that time at school, she must have been performing constantly. I was wrong. Yin corrected me: in their first years, a dancer would never see the stage. “You need to get your stretching, to get your stamina… Then in your 3rd or 4th year you can perform.” 

Choreography was also not an option in Shanghai. The government had a stake in “everything: schools, companies,” including dance. Art was not a medium to employ artistic liberties. “People are not welcome to share [their] ideas or what you have to say. The whole climate of China is very much like government control. It’s really not about you.” It became clear to Yin that China was not the place to pursue a career in art. So where was? 

Yin exclaimed New York as the obvious choice. “The movies, the media, the dancing were New York City, so where do you want to go then? Uhhhhh…. New York City.” She described New York and China as two poles: if you wanted to choreograph, China was not an option, and New York City was the best option. NYC garnered more intensity and competition than she found even in other American metropolises, which she described with excitement. “When you go to a place that is slower, that’s when you feel the difference.”

Yin completed her MFA at NYU Tisch in 2008. Here she was introduced to the more malleable form of contemporary dance which she combined with her foundational skills of Chinese classical and folk dance to create FoCo ((Fo)lk-(Co)ntemporary) technique. With FoCo, Yin intended to create a contemporary technique that would  “provide the foundation, the resistance, the strength, the balance, the physicality…needed to perform.” Each rehearsal, we begin in a deep plie in second; we follow an instructor while they take us through a series of repetitive movements that tackle strength while maintaining agility needed for dance. The movement clearly inspires her choreography, which is consistently grounded in the floor and draws on ‘stepping’ that occurs in Folk Dance. 

Yin recalled the first time she ever choreographed, “the solo I did at NYU. That solo still [is] performed by other companies, I am very proud of that.” It was a piece she choreographed and performed herself while still getting her degree. It was the beginning of her choreographic career. I imagine something created by her body, for her body garnering so much success was the foundation for the confidence in her artistry and production we see today. A single-bodied beginning to the more daunting larger works she currently produces. 

Currently, Yin is working on a trilogy she started in 2023 with the piece SOMEWHERE. They finished the first and the second (NOWHERE), and Yin teased that she had begun working on the final third (untitled as of now). When I ask what her trilogy is about, Yin says, “it’s existential, it’s not really about anything. It’s about that feeling, are we here?… for what purpose? But it is not in any shape or form a narrative story. We are implying a feeling; we are forming, destroying, reforming.” 

She links the trilogy together by their endings and beginnings. In SOMEWHERE, “the dancers exit the stage through a portal, so they are leaving but then also entering,” referencing her set design with a vacuous unlit doorway enshrouded in what seems to be large bed-sheets which drape and cover the entire back of the stage. At the end of the piece, a star-like light shines from inside the portal, the dancers enter. She explains,“there is always something from the end that indicates a beginning. So if something begins it inevitably ends.”  In NOWHERE, the portal takes a new shape; the stage is surrounded on all sides by audience members, entrapping the dancers, however, a large circular light hangs from the ceiling – reminiscent of a UFO preparing to steal a cow. Her long-form choreography project tackles cyclical-being through never defining a clear beginning or end, simple new eras. This is present in the choreography itself; new pairings of people, qualities of movement are seamlessly tied together. Even if she is creating in segments, you will not find the seams. Yin stresses this in rehearsal. She implores us to never stop moving, to never consider two steps separated; rather, to always find the thread. Her dancers partake in eras of the piece, never uncontextualized. The eras of her life might have influenced this thematic choice. First dancing in Shanghai, to New York, to choreographing, to having a world renowned company. Each era influences another, but does the era ever end? 

Yin perhaps speaks of the era from a personal perspective. Her era in China, to her era in New York, to her era now; her past and present are fused, as displayed in the evolution of her choreography and technique. How does the immigrant experience influence choreography? Yin acknowledges the clear stylistic influences in her choreography and FoCo, but maintains that it cannot be defined as Chinese, “It’s not a Chinese dance or Chinese dance study historically. So FoCo technique or movement style is contemporary dance.” FoCo and her choreography are the evolution of her foundation; it is the new era without a clear beginning or end. Yin intentionally clarified she is “not demonstrating what Chinese dance is or could be.” Rather, “I am here doing a form of dance, but naturally, it has Chinese culture because I’m Chinese.” She is melding her Chinese tradition to the modern traditions she found in New York City.   

In this new era of teaching, Yin chose to restage her piece Ripple with students for the Princeton Dance Festival. Yin created Ripple in 2020 during the pandemic. To adapt to the pandemic’s conditions, Yin worked with small groups of dancers to create small groups and segments, piecing them together to make a whole. When asked why she chose this piece for us, she responded, “The movement language is leaning towards balletic,” returning to her previous statements about ‘traditional’ dance. Yin took into consideration our background and tried to find what would flow the best with us. She is constantly modifying the piece: “I am reshaping and adding things that were not in the original piece, so the piece will probably not look the same.” The Princeton Dance community is now a part of a new era; we will perform this work which is rooted in how Yin understands herself and her movement, and adapted to how she understands us in the context of her work. You can see the new era of Ripple on November 22-23 at 8 PM and November 23-24 at 2 PM in the Berlind Theatre — see you there