The World Of THE WORLD OF
BEHIND THE SUN

Our icon is a medieval sun, redrawn from the Flammarion engraving, an anonymous wood engraving first published in 1888. That original work portrayed a traveller reaching the ends of the earth, and poking his head through to new realms of imagined futures.

The sun conveys the core of what we do. Night and day. Earthly and cosmic. We create worlds, and worlds revolve around the sun.

INTERVIEW, TAIGA KITA-LEONG
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“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.

Ecdysis, 2023
THE WORLD OF

Can you recall a time when the world felt full of possibility for you?

Taiga Kita-Leong

In London, my partner and I went to experience Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City, choreographed by Maxine Doyle. It was the largest-scale theatre performance I’ve ever seen. Being immersed within the work—with the best contemporary dancers in the world, in a huge theatre space—was an experience. I felt … possibilities within dance and performance I’ve never experienced before.

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THE WORLD OF

Name a song that changed your mind.

Kita-Leong

I can’t think of a specific song, but as a genre, techno trance changed my mind. Improvising [dance] to it was the first time I was able to enter the state of flow. Its repetitive nature helps me focus on my inner dialogue and the conversation that my body produces.

THE WORLD OF

Can you explain the genesis of your performance for THE WORLD OF?

Kita-Leong

It all started with questioning myself. What does the word reborn mean to me? How does this relate to who I am, as an individual and an artist? With that came the concepts of individual transformation and personal rebirth. Humans are constantly changing and evolving. We exist in the present and reminisce upon the past. Two lines in the project brief really resonated with me: “a metamorphosis into the next, the new” and “the shedding of skin.” They sparked the work’s key symbols: the serpent and the womb.

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THE WORLD OF

What’s the function of the fabric you’ve used?

Kita-Leong

It appears at the beginning of the piece, [symbolising] the outer layer. Fabric portrays the delicate womb in which metamorphosis and transformation occurs, while conveying the serpent’s second layer of skin. It embodies the act of shedding—sloughing the previous layer of skin to start anew.

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THE WORLD OF

There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald line about how our perception shapes reality, “The world exists only in your eyes… You can make it as big or as small as you want.” How big is your world?

Kita-Leong

My world is huge, but I know my perspective and experience of it is so small. As I’m only 22, I still have a multitude of learning to do. [I’m trying to] have a deeper understanding about myself, to broaden my perspectives, and am in constant refinement of my art form of movement.

FURTHER READING instagram.com/taiga_kl
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