Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers says goodbye with Echo and Flame/Fenghuang Awakens

During a recent chat over tea at a local coffee shop, our conversation turned to a mutual friend, Naomi Orwin, whom we lost some years ago. She had lived nearby, and I came across her writing about the company while researching this essay.

“That actually spells out everything about impermanence of life,” Lin said, “That relates to sunsetting the company. We are talking about sunset and sunrise. It’s part of the circle of life.”

Impermanence, peace, and possibilities

We had impermanence on our minds. The March home series will feature the world premiere of 17 Moves/In Memory of Gus, remembering Lin’s former teacher, Gus Solomons Jr., who died just two years after collaborating with Lin in 2021’s Where Is My B-O-D-Y. For that project, which included Kathak dancer Pallabi Chakravorty, Solomons made a list of 17 verbs, and the three dancers/choreographers improvised movements, or tasks, inspired by the words. Chakravorty will return to dance in the improvisational piece on Saturday afternoon, and Lin himself will be performing Saturday evening.

The centerpiece of the performance, Fire Ritual Dance/Fenghuang In Us, started life with a different name in Singapore. It was a multimedia production with a large art installation at its center. Later, in a residency at Swarthmore, Lin stripped the big production away and added students on the Japanese taiko drums. Now, the piece features drums just to announce the beginning of the dance. Lin said that the first dance he saw as a child was in a Confucian hall, where a big drum announces the ceremony before the dancers perform the ritual, and “I try to pass on those memories, that upbringing.”

Fenghuang is the Eastern Phoenix, Lin said, but it doesn’t represent rebirth in China; it’s about an awakening, when there is peace, and suggests new possibilities and even hope. “I read on the news the world is burning. So that’s why I created this dance called Fire Ritual. I started to realize that ritual is so important to us, to be in touch with our own heartbeats. Meaning common humanity.” For Lin, the dance reflects on all his relationships—with himself, with family, with his company, and the community, including both of his countries. “So this piece is actually my letter to the world,” he said, “we always believe that for a sunset, a sunrise will come. The piece becomes a whole journey.”

Embodying yin and yang

Lin’s story began as a boy in Taiwan who wanted to take dance lessons like his sisters, but he found his purpose in a 1998 New York Times review by critic Jennifer Dunning. “She said my work was about strong craft, the dancing is very polished, and highly spiritual. I know craft. You learn what craft means, right? I had no idea what spiritual meant! That became my whole journey, trying to understand what spiritual means.” Now, he says, “When you talk about spirituality, there are three essential questions: who are you? Why are you here? Where are you going? In a way it’s a spiritual question, because it’s a big question. So every piece I open with asking that. Who are you?”

So far, Lin has choreographed 110 pieces, and they are all imbued with autobiography: Lin was raised in the Catholicism of his father, but steeped in the religions around him—Confucianism, but also Buddhism, and especially Taoism. Chi has become his centering concept. Chi is invisible, he said, and the tension between the visible and the invisible is embedded in his work. “my name is right out there—Kun-Yang Lin is the forest of Yin and Yang: Lin means forest. Kun-Yang means yin and yang, the tai chi symbol. The black and white.”

He explained that Chi is always in tension. Lin lives between two countries, and “as immigrants, you always have that tension. I’m married to [Ken]. I moved to Western society. And he’s obviously a different race than me. So you are living in this between space.”

Listening to the wind

In the beginning, it was about building a company, a life, and finding his way in dance, against adversity: the death of his father and his own diagnosis of brain cancer and recovery in 2001, his move to Philadelphia. He is proud of his time teaching at Temple University and sees it as a way to honor his father. There’d been another brain cancer scare in 2018, And then there was Covid and the isolation that was almost monastic.

Lin and Metzner escaped to the ocean, where “there is a lot of wind. So I often hear the wind, it allows me to really feel.” He thought about the pandemic, and death and how sudden it could be. Then he found the stillness inside, “and that’s where the wind starts to happen. So I wanted to create that dance,” he says of The Wind, which Lin himself premiered in 2021. The period led to a rediscovery of his creativity, which included the B-O-D-Y project—a pivotal expression in dance of the journey toward sunset.

Continuing to create

The couple are not getting any younger, they said, and neither are their mothers, who are elderly and widowed and living on different continents. “My father passed away right before September 11,” Lin told me, “but I was a performer. I had my contract, and I couldn’t go back to Asia for almost a month.” This time, they want no regrets.

“What’s going away is the structure,” Metzner says of the KYL/D sunset. “It’s just not having that responsibility to maintain, to feed and nurture the company and the nonprofit.” Lin promises that he will continue to create with other companies and collaborators, and they are trying to find a buyer who will keep the company’s South Philadelphia studio, the CHI Movement Arts Center, in the industry, but the absence of the company and the programs will be missed.

People in dance are already mourning the loss of the Inhale series, a program that gave many smaller companies a place to perform. Lin says they are sharing their experience within the art community so that more organizations can create new opportunities. But I will miss wandering into the CHI studio for a chat or a work in progress, or to see some of the small companies that don’t cross a wider audience’s radar. And I will miss Lin and Metzner, though I expect we will see them on other stages.

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