NATIONAL PREMIERE
Xie Xin is the rising star of oriental choreography. At thirty-two, born in China's Jiangxi Province, she began her training in traditional dance with her mother before studying at the Guangdong Dance School, where she graduated in 2004. Against her parents' wishes, who didn’t see dance as a "sufficiently stable" career, Xie Xin became a prominent performer in top Chinese companies: Guangdong Modern Dance Company (China’s first modern dance company, founded in 1987), Jinxing Dance Theatre, Tao Dance Theatre, and Beijing Dance LDTX. Since 2014, she has worked as an independent choreographer and directs her own company, which serves as both an artistic hub and a center for cross-cultural exchange with the West during summer sessions.
Xie Xin has won awards at prestigious European choreography competitions in Hannover and Rome (2015), and her expanding repertoire—including Unknown, Floating Flow Mrk, Listen to the Body, Falling +, Plus, Face 2 Face—has been performed across Asia, the USA, and Europe. Her work is especially celebrated at the Kuopio Festival in Finland, where Artistic Director Jorma Uotinen praises her enthusiastically. For the first time, at the Oriente Occidente Festival, she presents From IN, her acclaimed 2015 work for nine dancers, including herself. This piece explores the Chinese word ren, meaning “person.” “As human beings,” explains Xie Xin, “we share memories when we connect. I started here for this piece: from desires, love, violence, sweetness—the emotions that shape our interactions. Without them, we’re merely indifferent lives in parallel spaces.”
From IN delves deep, transforming inner experiences into intricate, suspended dance. The choreography is a stream of consciousness; torsos undulate, and wave-like movements give dancers a fluidity that seems to defy the limits of joints and bones. Watching From IN is like entering a dream, where bodies merge seamlessly with the air around them.
