Yolanda Tianyi-Shao

Yolanda Tianyi Shao is a Chinese creator and choreographer. She works interdisciplinary with animators, composers, theater directors, actors, film makers, sound designers and photographers. Yolanda has her own specific standpoint of art making. With her background of years of dance training, she lost her interest in pursuing simply beautiful and identified dance movement, her work more deals with the extremes of human communication, physical theatrical performances where a literal dialogue occurs through movement and she also moved her steps into site-specific arts in recent years. She is interested in making work in the context of exploring the possibilities of the relationship between human and nature and deals with issues of the environment. In 2017 she created a group dance work called SALE, it’s about the material desires expanding in people’s life, people running for it, even tearing at each other. Some people are crazy about it, but behind the satisfaction is a boundless emptiness, while some people have the heart to withdraw, but they are more than enough. Behind the phenomenon, desire silently watches the picture of constant collapse and reconstruction, as well as the social landscape of ephemeral bliss. And then she made an experimental community version of this work in the summer of 2018 with an artist from Goldsmiths. In 2021, Yolanda created a project Ebb Tide in the Open House Concert at CalArts. She starts her collaboration with animators and composers in the piece Futile/Gestures in the later 2021. In the same year, she created a movement piece Breaking the Persona that was inspired by afemale photographer Wanyue An’s works. It performed in the exhibition My Next Incarnation that was curated by Yiwei Lu on March 19th in Los Angeles Keystone Art Space. She holds a bachelor of Dance from Nanjing Normal University in China and is currently pursuing the Master of Fine Art in Choreography at the California Institute of the Arts.