“If the dancer dances—which is not the same as having theories about dancing or wishing to dance or trying to dance or remembering in his body someone else’s dance—but if the dancer dances, everything is there” — so the late choreographer Merce Cunningham wrote. (He also spoke of dance as a radical and essential expression: the affirmation of life through movement.) In the work of Taiga Kita-Leong, a rising dance star and movement artist of Japanese-Chinese descent, “everything is there,” as Cunningham might say. Kita-Leong’s movements are honest, instinctual and elastic. He feels the most tranquil and at peace when his body is in motion: “specifically through improvisation, when I get to the state of flow.”
Kita-Leong studied at both the New Zealand School of Dance and Sydney Dance Company. He’s performed in myriad works, including Ohad Naharin’s DECADANCE (2022) with Sydney Dance Company and Meryl Tankard’s KAIROS (2023), which debuted at Sydney Festival. His original choreography for THE WORLD OF, performed only once in a black box studio and recorded, is memorialised on film. It streams at the studio’s offices.
