"The World of Movements – When Body Language Comes Alive" marks the first exhibition on body movements and the first experiment inviting spectators from all walks of life to collaborate creatively since the founding of Tao Dance Theater 2 in 2024. The exhibition's title is inspired by the TV program "Animal World," which the artist Tao Ye watched during his childhood; animals' specific way of moving about allows them to co-exist through their various overlapping trajectories. Similarly, human life consists of countless movements that reveal commonality and individuality, interdependence, and contradiction. However, for a long time, movements have been categorized and defined by various labels, which, to a certain extent, hinders the connection between the movements and the individual's body awareness.

Home is often considered a person's refuge in the world, a place where one’s perception returns to the body and mind. This exhibition transforms a museum gallery on floor 6 into a tunnel comprised of daily living scenes of various times and spaces. More than 20 amateur dancers from all walks of life, ages, and professions will dance continuously for the duration of the exhibition period in a spacious home context with an assortment of furniture and clocks.  

The exhibition aims to create a situation that swings between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the uncanny, the private and the public. Introducing visitors to improvised communal dances aims to evoke a comprehensive perception of the body through lived experiences on-site, encourage visitors to reconsider ways of human connection, and give them a sense of the infinite imagination when dance returns to the movements.

Unlike traditional museum exhibitions and theater performances, "The World of Movements –

When Body Language Comes Alive" is neither a fleeting performance nor a live performance piece but a participatory and co-creative theater that extends its timeline infinitely from conception to implementation and will always be in progress.

This project does not come with a complete “choreographic script” and the completed work, but a pre-designed set of logic and rules for the dancers on-site to follow.

The alternation of various movements and the visitors’ improvisation daily for six consecutive hours will evolve the form and content of each moment of the work as unexpected happenings occur.

In this "home" without walls, clocks are placed in each "room" scene, and people's body movements will follow the hands in an unpredictable order.

At the same time, resonating with the Tao Dance Theater 2 mantra of "Dance for You," this exhibition intentionally blurs the boundary between dancers and spectators. Spectators' participation becomes an indispensable component of the work, and anyone who walks into it becomes its co-creator.

Although the dancers had undergone several rounds of selection and systematic rehearsals before the exhibition opening, due to their various backgrounds and experiences and their lack of professional training, the way they mobilize their bodies preserves the tension of originality and freedom, which will be further stimulated and transformed during the exchange and collision of body language with diverse spectators.

There was no language at the beginning of the world.

We communicated through our bodies despite ambiguity, which did not prevent us from understanding each other;

We did not have homes at the beginning of the world.

Our bodies provided us minimal refuge, where we soothed our hearts between the boundlessness of heaven and earth;

In different corners of the world, the man left his handprints on the inner walls of caves in antiquity, whose palms still emanate warmth from today's perspective.

The body, capable of transcending time and space, merging life and death, holds the history of our childhood in its arms and settles every stream of memory;

The body, triggering intimate communions with others, recognizes our inherent unity through physical dialogue.

Have you stopped trying to understand every perception and stopped trying to communicate with the world through your body? When the body is forgotten or only understood partially, the enactment of movements may revitalize and rebuild it.

The exhibition "The World of Movements – When Body Language Comes Alive" hopes to inspire anyone who is in the process of connecting with their bodies.

With this, the exhibition sincerely invites visitors to let down their guards, open up their bodies, awaken their imagination, and walk into this dream-like world of movements to gain a profound sense of being.