Professor Ting-Ting Chang, PhD, is a dancer, choreographer, and educator. Currently, she is an assistant professor and the director of the International Educational Program at National Taiwan University of Arts. Her research focuses on contemporary dance in Asia and cross-cultural performance. Her interests include post colonialism, diaspora study and globalization. She has presented her interdisciplinary research at Association for Asian Studies, The Congress on Research in Dance, Society of Dance History Scholars, World Dance Alliance, etc. Professor Chang is also an artistic director of T.T.C Dance, and has presented works internationally including at the American Dance Festival and Festival d’Avignon, Off. She holds a PhD from University of California, Riverside, and an MFA from University of California, Irvine. She was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in dance at Washington University in St. Louis.
Articles
Linking the tradition to modernity
Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring has inspired a plethora of artists in its hundred years of history. As it transcends geographic barriers, it has also been choreographed by many great dance masters such as Maurice Béjart and Pina Bausch from the West, and Hwai-Min Lin and Helen Lai from the East. In this paper, Ting-Ting Chang focuses on the choreographic aesthetics of versions of The Rite of Spring by choreographers Zhang Xiaoxiong and Shen Wei. Zhang’s version depicts images with references both to the original work of Vaslav Nijinsky, and to aspects of Asian culture in a way that is sensitive to the original music and to his memories as a child living in Cambodia. Shen has been known for his organic movement vocabulary and unique way of using Chinese cultural elements. By tracing their separate creative processes, she discuss how choreographers negotiate tradition and innovation through their different choreographic methods and aesthetic visions through contemporary dance.