THE Silver Lion Award for Dance at the Venice Biennale goes to the TAO Dance Theater from China, the biennale announced Feb. 8.

The award was approved by the biennale’s board of directors at the recommendation of Wayne McGregor, artistic director of the biennale’s dance department. It will be conferred during the 17th International Festival of Contemporary Dance, which will take place in Venice, Italy on July 13-29.

The TAO Dance Theater, founded in 2008 by Tao Ye, Duan Ni and Wang Hao in Beijing, has quickly grown to make its presence known in major festivals and theaters. The members of the dance group have presented their works in cultural venues and festivals such as the Lincoln Center Art Festival, the Edinburgh International Art Festival, the Sydney Opera House, the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, and at the American Dance Festival, fascinating audience members in 40 countries and regions, as well as millions of TikTok users.

“Forsaking narrative, message and elaborate stage design in their work, Tao Ye and Duan Ni have built a unique and evolutionary dance genre that has enraptured with a mesmeric, minimalist force. Their company TAO Dance Theater has committed to a stripped-back, ‘pure dance’ aesthetic, eliminating any categorization of movement, and by extension, of themselves,” states McGregor in his motivation for the award.

“The body is presented as an element to be perceived for its optical allure — devoid of representation, narrative, or context, simply existing as an object alone. This is amplified only by the use of light and sound design, allowing viewers to be confronted and often challenged by the rigorous body-focused techniques, vocabulary and forms,” he adds.

“It is this confidence in the power of movement alone (and developed through their innovative Circular Movement System), with all its latent potential and expressivity, its nuance, elegance, idiosyncrasy, limitation and restriction that demands us to watch and watch again — to learn the hidden syntax and to really ‘see’ as if experiencing bodies and indeed dancing for the very first time — in all its spectacular wonder, elegance and direct visceral, kinaesthetic communication,” states McGregor.

Understanding the very nature of the body as a “microcosm of the universe,” the TAO Dance Theater has found their special territory to explore. Their “Numerical Series” with simple creative concept and simple body aesthetics have toured all over the world. Time Out New York named the company’s performances one of the 10 Best Dance Shows of 2014.

The dance theater will be at the Biennale Danza 2023 on July 28-29 with three new works in their European premiere performance at the Teatro Malibran in Venice. The three new works, titled “11,” “13” and “14,” continue the sequence of its “Numerical Series” that launched them on the international scene.

U.S. dancer and theoretician Simone Forti, whose constant innovation involved all the arts, is this year’s winner of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Silver Lion Award for Dance program is dedicated to promoting promising artists in dance and the institutions that have distinguished themselves for cultivating new talents.

(SD News)