Yienan Song: Dancing from the Dream State

IN ANCIENT TIMES, SAYS TAIWAN-NATIVE DANCER/CHOREOGRAPHER Yienan Song, dance was a sacred ritual to heal the human body, mind and spirit.

“Dancing is making love with God,” she says. “My most beautiful dancing is done in the dream state, where I can fly, float, and defy gravity. In American Indian and many other cultures, sages speak of the ‘dream body,’ we are most alive when we are in the unconscious dream state. When we awaken, we are in fact less awake, more limited. Sometimes when I awake I don’t want to come back to the physical world, and so I try to keep on in that dream state as I begin my daily dance.”

Song is the founder and artistic director of Ancient of Days Dance Theater, a modern dance theater nourished by ancient wisdom. Its philosophy: Dance is a means to rebirth our mental, emotional, physical body and soul bodies. Says Song, “The rite becomes alive when the human heart expands, the dance becomes virtuous when all levels of existence integrate into wholeness. When the wind blows, energy flows, the whole humanity begins to dance, and the planet begins to heal.”

Song began her dance training at the age of five, studying both classical Chinese dance and ballet, and was a principal dancer and choreographer for a variety of Taiwan-based companies before a dance scholarship to the California Institute of the Arts brought her to the U.S. in 1983. After earning her M.F.A., Song moved to New York in 1986, and founded Ancient of Days Dance Theater the following year. Utilizing a wide variety of disciplines, from traditional Taiwanese to Martha Graham-style modern, Song has created a vocabulary of movement that transcends cultural and stylistic divides.

Song believes that the divine essence which inspires us shows different faces in different cultures and times, but comes from one source. “How we move shows how we communicate with ourselves and the Source,” she says. The awareness has let to an integration of dance and healing in her life and work. Song praises the natural, unrestrained movements of children and animals, “and you see how freely, how beautifully and gracefully they move.”

Like Isadora Duncan, Song believes she was dancing before she was born, in her mother’s womb. This woman, who is able to articulate through dance passionate expressions of strength, sexuality and sacred power, was a scrawny, introverted child, shunned by playmates. Dance lessons were prescribed to strengthen her weak limbs, and she quickly became a star performer with a succession of dance companies. Song’s prominent Taiwanese family, who expected her to become a doctor or lawyer, disapproved of her choice of career – “This profession is almost on the level of a concubine in the Far East, she explains.