Yin Mei

Yin Mei was born in China and started her professional career in traditional Chinese dance during the Cultural Revolution. Before coming to the United States to study modern dance on a grant from the Asian Cultural Council, she was a member of a leading Chinese dance company. Yin Mei now choreographs and performs her contemporary work worldwide, having forged a dance style employing Chinese energy direction and spatial principles as a means of creating dance within the rubric of Western dance-theater.

Yin Mei's most recent work, /Asunder, a multi-media, cross-cultural dance theater work created in collaboration with installation artist Cai Guo-Qiang and composer Robert Een, was produced by MAPP and premiered at Danspace Project in New York in May 2001. /Asunder toured to eleven U.S. cities throughout 2002 to critical and audience acclaim. In December 2002, Yin Mei presented a work-in-progress version of Nomad: The River at Danspace Project at St. Marks Church. Yin Mei's evening-length dance theater work, Empty Tradition/City of Peonies, premiered at the Asia Society in New York City in fall 1998 and was presented at the Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival in August 1999. Conceived, choreographed and directed by Yin Mei, Empty Tradition/City of Peonies was the product of a year-long collaboration with Indonesian composer Tony Prabowo and prominent Chinese installation artist Xu Bing. Performers included dancers from Tibet and the U.S., a Buddhist martial artist, seven Indonesian musicians and a violist.

Yin Mei's choreography has been presented at New York venues including: Danspace Project, DTW, La Mama ETC., the Asia Society, the Japan Society, PACE Downtown Theater, the Mulberry Street Theater, Lincoln Center Out-Of-Doors Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Queens College Theater, P.S. 1 and the Knitting Factory. Her work has been presented twice at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, and at U.S. venues including Columbia College Dance Center ( Chicago), UCLA, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of California at Santa Cruz, the Kohler Arts Center ( Wisconsin), University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona State University in Tempe, Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, University of Alaska and Bard College. Internationally, her work has been presented at Tokyo's Theater X, the Hong Kong Town Hall Theatre and the Jerusalem Museum, Chikamatsu Festival (Nagato, Japan), the BBB Festival (Potsdam, Germany), the Indonesian Dance Festival (Jakarta), the Korea International Dance Festival (Seoul) and the Contemporary Dance Festival of West Sumatra. She was one of ten international choreographers invited to participate in the 50th anniversary of the American Dance Festival.