“Provenance:
A Letter to My Daughter”
a screendance
completed May 2022, 9 min. 19 sec.
the Experimental, Dance & Music Film Festival’s “Best Direction Award” winner!
A short dance film about a transnational adoptee's personal experiences struggling with identity, belonging, and inclusion growing up in the Midwest of America.
Directed and choreographed by Li Chiao-Ping, dancer Elisabeth Roskopf's exquisite movement and personal story reclaiming her heritage are captured beautifully by cinematographer and editor Christal Wagner.
It will be screened at:
2023 RADFest
2023 Phoenix Film Festival
2023 Experimental Dance & Music Film Festival
“concrete”
November 2022
A new solo created in collaboration with LCPD alumni and all around stunning performer, Kimi Evelyn, premiered in LCPD’s November 2022 performance “bits ‘n pieces.” This deeply emotional and personal work was juxtaposed in a program with a variety of silly, shocking, absurd, and abstract works.
Originally drafted in 2018, this one woman solo featured a white femme dancer climbing and clawing at a glass ceiling. In the 2022 remix, Li Chiao-Ping called upon the personal stories of Evelyn to paint a more complete (and intersectional) picture of feminism and inequity between the sexes.
The single spotlight illuminates Evelyn’s subtle yet expressive gestural movement, virtuosity, and most importantly her story. The text written by both Li and Evelyn, articulating Evelyns story of finding comfort, confidence, joy, and magic in her own skin.
Most recently, “concrete” was performed at the WhiteWave SoloDuo Festival in NYC, February 2023.
“Here Lies the Truth”
Here Lies the Truth evening length concert premiere: Friday March 24th, 2022
Tour:
Red Eye Theater, Minneapolis, MN - April 2023
CounterPulse in San Francisco, CA - September 2022
Asia Pacific Dance Festival in Honolulu, HI - August 2022
part i premiere: Friday, August 14 2020
part ii premiere: Thursday, April 1 2021
part iii premiere: Friday, July 30 2021
"Here Lies the Truth" is a current Li Chiao-Ping Dance project tackling one of today's sticky topics--Truth. This piece poses questions of position, privilege, power, access, and equity. Through real facts, fiction, hyperbole, absurdity, and raw dance/physical theater, we aim to complicate the simplistic and simplify the complex through multiple lenses: gender, race, the color of one’s skin, their socio-economic condition, and more. Through our screens we are able to create a boundary between the performers and the viewers that mimics the new age concept of ‘keyboard courage’. What can we say through a screen that cannot be said in person, and why is this boundary employed by the speaker? In our social distancing we are forced to view from afar, and how does that warp our sense of reality, truth, and lies? “Here Lies the Truth” is created in this momentous time to explore truth and lies and how these permeate our inner landscapes and built environment. When information being consumed is not always trustworthy, how can that affect our ability to believe our own truths?
“bits ‘n pieces”
Evening Length Concert
November 2022
Fresh off the company’s Here Lies the Truth national tour (a show that premiered at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison late March 2022), LCPD is excitedly returned to Madison with a different set of works from LCPD’s treasure trove.
A concert, titled bits ‘n pieces, is a family-friendly and entertaining show featuring premieres and rarely seen works (strange but familiar; Sur La Table; WhatNot, You Think; and concrete) along with some repertory favorites, including Gó, the nationally recognized work that was selected for the ACDA concert at the Kennedy Center for the Arts, Nuts and Bolts, the memorable Dynasty-clad trio, and two short works from The Knotcracker, including It’s a Slippery Slope and e-Racers.
terza rima: Writings on the Body
Evening Length Concert
April 2022
In collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dance Department and the Department of French and Italian, Li Chiao-Ping Dance (LCPD) proudly presents terza rima: Writings on the Body. Join us for an evening of multidisciplinary dance works during the Dante after Dante Conference, a UW-Madison’s contribution to the world-wide celebration of the septcentenary of Dante’s death in 2021. The concert enters the world of Dante’s Divine Comedy by way of live dance performance, live music, and video. Li Chiao-Ping's “Fortuna” takes its inspiration from the dolce stil novo poetic style made famous by poet Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy, wherein Virgil explains the nature of goddess Fortuna as a christianized deity of chance and luck to Dante in the seventh canto of Inferno. Experience Dante’s imagery through Li Chiao-Ping Dance’s striking athleticism and nuanced physicality. The concert as a whole is structured to give the audience a feel for the journey through Dante's worlds. Guest Artists Chele Issac and Julia McConahay join LCPD to bring more to the mix with film and live violin accompaniment.
“perspective is (past/present/future) tense”
January 2021
Li Chiao-Ping Dance received a wonderful opportunity to create a site-specific work at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art early this year and we are delighted to premiere this new screendance work with you! Go to MMOCA.org to see it as well!
“LANDED”/”Here Lies the Truth”
October 15, 2020
Li Chiao-Ping Dance presents an evening-length multimedia concert telling the stories of United States citizens that are often unheard or ignored. These stories are that of immigration and assimilation, fact versus fiction in our political systems, both on macro and micro scales, and are told in such a way that the audience can relate. Together the performers and audience members can create a collective ‘we’ in order to understand each other and move forward with enlightenment and kindness rather than judgment and oppression.
“Apollo”
Part of 7DaysDancing
Premiered at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI, February 1, 2020.
7DaysDancing: Dance and Performance Events directed/choreographed by Li Chiao-Ping in Dane County. This 7-part series of crafted live art experiences will activate our community spaces in new, inventive, and inviting ways, with seven distinct events on the seven days of the week. These public events serve to engage audiences to see dance out of traditional theater spaces, connect live art to the artworks being exhibited, and feel more comfortable within spaces sometimes perceived as intimidating places belonging to those more educated, established, and privileged.