DANCERCHRIS

Born in Hong Kong, Christopher Chu started dancing and has never stopped since he moved to Taiwan in 1982. Chu is the founding member of Ku & Dancers, the only professional dance company in Taiwan devoted to the development and exploration of improvisation dance performance. He is also a founding member of the Performing Arts Alliance in Taiwan. On a parallel track, he has worked as a project manager of an engineering consultant company in Taipei for twenty-three years, in charge of hundreds of successful projects nationwide scaling from million to billion of dollars. Since 2010 he has been invited to be the Taiwan representative of Mirramu Creative Arts Pty. Ltd. (Australia), coordinating the company's projects in Taiwan. Active as a freelance dancer, choreographer and dance teacher, Chu is currently a PhD student at the School of Dance of Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), from where he received his MFA majoring in choreography. His research focus is the body and philosophy in improv dance as performance. His academic brilliance has brought him twice the Graduate Scholarship from TNUA and also a special scholarship as a visiting scholar to Ohio State University, USA. 

With a thirty-year experience in Contact Improvisation (CI), Chu is considered the first-generation successor of this practice in Taiwan. Trained or influenced directly by the pioneers of CI, including Steve Paxton, Nancy S. Smith, Kirstie Simson, etc., he has been teaching CI in many universities, groups and dance companies in Taiwan and abroad since the late 90s. 

Profiting from his engineering background, Chu also found interest in digital imagery programming and real-time interactive dance and has created dance and technology works since 2005. With the capability of speaking dance and technology languages, he has supported many interdisciplinary collaborations. 

The review in Ballet Review (summer 2012) best depicts his dance performance: He made the whole event an ineffable artistic effusion of cosmic energy. He seemed a young Lao Tsu, revealing his belief that dance can achieve harmony.