Bridge Dance Festival 2024

Chih-Hsien Lin, a native Taiwanese, is an independent movement artist, embodied thinker, and a clinical counselor specialized in somatic-based approaches. She currently works as a founding member and collaborator of IS/LAND (an Asian and Asian American identified performance collective group), a working artist with Khecari, and running her solo practice Embodied Way Psychotherapy for mental health services. As an immigrant artist, Chih-Hsien works passionately with an integrative and authentic sense of self and movement directions. She forges continuous collaborations into inclusive embodiment and emotional experiences in her own being and dance making; her movement language and aesthetics reflect a rich cultural bearing from traditional Asian ethnic dances and martial arts to a vast array of somatic modern integrations. She creates circular worlds of kinesthesia, juxtaposition, and reflection, elucidating the subtlety, complexity, and fluidity of living. Open Diary – 100th Day Offering is Chih-Hsien’s most recent dance brainchild, exploring the most common human experience of grief, Otherness, home, witnessing, blessings, and the intersection between language, movement, psychology, and human ecology. As a therapist, Chih-Hsien believes that trauma heals in relationships, and by engaging in embodied realities it can bring wholeness and truthfulness in processing pain and struggles. She also values the differences and uniqueness in people.

Dancer, director, and producer Ray Nakazawa started ballet and modern dance from an early age. She started presenting her works in her late teens at the Contemporary Dance Association of Japan. She organizes Orbitallink, an improvisational collective with musicians and other genres, and holds 20 raffle ‘improvisational battles’ around the world, including Kyoto, Nagoya, Tokyo, Paris, and Berlin, which is held throughout the year.

In the 2000s, she moved her base to Paris, France, and presented dance works that collaborate with video and technology. After returning to Japan in 2007, she moved to Mie Prefecture due to her child’s illness. While conducting dance and yoga classes for people with mental and developmental disabilities, she began to question the imbalance and over-concentration of dance in Tokyo, and began performing dance in the context of social activities, architecture, welfare, and education, mainly in the Mie Prefecture.