Tao took her first dance class when she was nineteen, considered a late start for a career in dance. At the time, she was majoring in cultural anthropology at National Taiwan University, and was also active in theater, poetry, and music activities. Her interest in dance remained strong throughout 'college, but doubts based on her age and lack of training held her back from pursuing it further.
In 1981, she began graduate studies in cultural anthropology at the University of Kansas, where she also took dance classes. The following year, she transferred to the dance department, and in 1984 received an M.F.A. in dance and returned to Taiwan.
Her first dance, Tao Shu Lung, premiered in the summer of 1985. Since then she has choreographed fourteen different pieces and has performed for the past three years at the Solo Dancers of Asia Festival in Hong Kong, sponsored by the Hong Kong Academy of Arts. She is now teaching choreography and improvisation at the National Institute of the Arts in Taipei. Her most recent creation is a one-woman sequence entitled Happy Birthday.
FCR: When you're creating a dance, how do you go from idea to final product?
Tao: I'm a mover – that's the main thing I do. It's my basic language. Everything else is developed around movement. So when I did Happy Birthday, I started out with movement. I decided what kind of feeling I wanted. Next, I tried to develop the motivation of the dance, and then I worked with the music. This time, I used all cello music. Music has its own rhythms, so I had to change my rhythmic pattern a bit to interact with the music.
Because I'm interested in theater, I always use actors. Happy Birthday has various actors, such as stage hands and a child, plus a number of props, and it goes on without music sometimes. Because I don't tell stories with a plot, you don't see things like a person moving from childhood to adulthood. Instead, you see different segments and images, all combined. When I build the piece, I have to think through the whole thing and decide which part is theater performance and which part is dance, and what their respective needs are. The whole thing, the ebb and flow of the whole structure, is like producing a painting. You have to feel if the line is right, if the breath or energy is right.
In Happy Birthday I wanted to create the atmosphere of a dream. Although I use concrete props, when all the images combine, they don't seem so real anymore. It's very important that you feel the energy of the movement, the same way you feel the melodic line and rhythmic structure in music.
FCR: How important is technique to a choreographer?
Tao: Technique is very important, but there are many different styles of movement, especially in modern dance. Dancers basically search for their own style. They may have been trained in classical ballet or the modern dance of Martha Graham or José Limón, but they can't do Martha Graham, can't do Limón. They have to present their own style.
FCR: You said in one of your dance program notes, "I don't care about the how of movement, I care about what it is that makes people move."
Tao: Those are Pina Bausch's words. As a dance student, the most influential choreographer for me was Pina Bausch, from Germany. She does "Danz Theater" – that's the name for her dance style.
Because I'm also very interested in theater, I have always wanted to combine theater with dance. I didn't want to do purely "dance" presentations. I like to communicate with my body. I was deeply influenced by Pina Bausch's aesthetic approach. When I saw her Danz Theater, I was stunned. She opened up a whole new horizon for me in the way she combined theatrical elements with dance.
FCR: What kind of elements?
Tao: She uses the movements of everyday life, but she puts them into dance phrases. You can feel the motivation behind her movements. In Martha Graham's dances, you can tell that this is Medea, this is Clytemnestra, because the characters are very distinctive. But in Pin a Bausch's Danz Theater, the characters are drawn more from everyday life. They're people without names, but their characters and personalities are clear. Their movements are very subtle, and the subtlety gives the movements meaning, because you can understand the motivation behind the movement.
FCR: Many of your pieces have a reputation for being political and very feminist. Is that also true of Happy Birthday?
Tao: Happy Birthday is a feminine piece, not feminist. I decided to do it that way because I was tired of being labeled political and feminist, and tired of the whole political scene here. It makes me feel frustrated, and I just don't give a damn about the political situation now. I don't want to talk about it in my dances.
FCR: What ideas inspire you to create new dances?
Tao: It's always different. I would say that my 1987 piece Her Life is very feminist because it's mainly about women's self-awareness and their need to be truly independent. Martial law was lifted in 1987. Suddenly many restrictions were gone, and people began to get a taste of freedom. All their energies burst forth like a bomb. It inspired me to do a very sociopolitical piece called Ah?! ...
Happy Birthday is just about myself as a woman, but done in the style of a dream. There is a painting by Dorothy Tanning, a self-portrait called Birthday. It portrays a woman, half naked, standing in front of the door, with endless half open doors behind her. Part of my idea comes from that painting. The dance is a kind of retrospective of my own life as a woman, especially the burdens. Ten years ago you couldn't become a dancer if you started late. I wanted to express the feeling – the frustrated feeling – of being a woman in this society.
The piece shows me together with three stage hands who are like the stage hands in Peking opera. Originally, stage hands wore Chinese robes. When they had to change the scene, they would just walk on stage, change the furniture and other props around, and then go off again without performing at all. But I use them as performers. They have to be aware that they are on stage. They're wearing surgical masks and long white robes, like doctors in a hospital. And I also include a child, a six-year-old former student of mine. As always, I use props and a stage setting.
One prop is a Chinese door. Chinese doors come in two tall sections that open in the middle, unlike most Western one-piece doors. In Peking opera, they always hang a piece of cloth to symbolize a door or entrance. Mine is a real door, but you know that it's a Chinese door because there is a cloth on the door as in Peking opera. On the door you also see two parts of a Chinese scroll. One of the props is a Chinese altar table. Usually, this holds the ancestral shrine, but I put a TV set on it.
FCR: Why the TV set?
Tao: Television is used as a metaphor for mass culture. I also use a sofa and a toilet bowl. So I have a contemporary set combined with an abstract traditional Chinese set.
The television shows a videotaped interview of women who talk about their dreams, especially the feminine or sexual part of their dreams. One of them would say, "I always dream that I'm walking around naked." Another would say she had dreamed she was raped. The women talk about their dreams in the most intimate terms, very personal – I mean, very sexual and vivid-about their own bodies and their fears.
FCR: Modern dance is primarily a Western art form. When you do dance that is essentially Chinese, what do you change? Is there a different language, a Chinese language of movement?
Tao: All artists have to figure out who they are. I think of myself as a person who grew up in the city and was educated in the city and abroad. But I'm interested in my own cultural roots, so in one of the pieces that I choreographed for Taipei Dance Forum, I started to combine my Chinese cultural background with Western elements. That piece is called Episodes of the Gray Dresses.
Some people might say that it's very political, or very sociopolitical. It's about three generations of a family, although it's not so overtly obvious. You can identify some of the old generation by the fact that they walk with canes. The setting is two chairs and a table with an old-fashioned radio on it. The setting is standard for Peking opera. For music, I use Peking opera, traditional Taiwanese songs, and old Chinese tunes.
FCR: You performed this at the Hong Kong International Dance Festival. What kind of audience did you have?
Tao: People from New York, Europe, and Hong Kong. There were dancers, critics, and teachers. When they saw my dance, they thought, "There's something new here." They immediately connected it with a Chinese, or more specifically, a Taiwanese place. And that's precisely the message I wanted to relay.
FCR: It seems you are trying to realize, in a Chinese way, a basically Western vision of what dance can be.
Tao: That's right. Movement is what motivates me. My dances are always about human beings, how they move and how they feel. And traditional culture is like a layer on top of that. Usually, when you think of Chinese dance, you see traditional fans and ribbons, but in Episodes of the Gray Dresses, the movement is more Western. But it is first and foremost human, although the basic atmosphere – my feeling of the piece – is Chinese. All the music is Chinese. And that is what gives the dance its Chinese atmosphere or the sense that it is happening within Chinese society.
FCR: Do you think it's important for artists to keep their roots? For example, could you have been just as effective if you had stayed in the U.S. and continued dancing there? Or do you feel it was necessary to come back?
Tao: I can't speak for other artists because art can travel many different paths. Artists have to choose their own way. I feel I must stay in my own society because my cultural roots are very important to me. From the very beginning I was interested in the combination of the contemporary with my cultural roots. I've always been interested in Chinese literature and Peking opera. That's part of my existence. But the largest part of my existence is that of a city person and a person trained in Western styles.
Impressive legacy – a ten-year-old photograph of a performance by Cloud Gate, Taiwan's first international-class dance ensemble.
I am a mixture, and this appears in my dances. Since the beginning of this year, I have started to clarify how to create my own form of Danz Theater. Both Episodes of the Gray Dresses and Happy Birthday are very contemporary, but they also emanate a sense of Chineseness, Taiwaneseness. I haven't fully articulated it yet, but I know that I have my own way now.
In the past few years, I tried to find my way, but I wasn't satisfied. I have to find out more about my own existence as a mixture. But this year, I began to think about what I am, what I want to do, what I want to feel. I am discovering the traditional part of me and the cultural part of me. It's a very precious discovery. Yet it's still just a starting point, a step. An artist has to treat it as that: just a step in a long journey.