Lin's dance comes full circle

Cheng and Tao share a lot in common regarding their approach to art. In August, Cheng spent four weeks in Tao's dance studio, which is located in Beijing's northeast suburbs.

He observed the dancers' daily training, communicated with them like friends, sharing their stories, before starting his choreography.

He conducted improvisational practices for the dancers and "when I threw an idea out to them, they replied with different physical movements, which grew into different directions like tree branches", Cheng says.

"I named the piece Multiplication because the piece was born out of rounds of discussion and contains rich dance vocabularies," says Cheng, who studied dance since the age of 8 and graduated from the dance department of Taipei National University of the Arts in 2002.

Born into a poor family in Taipei, Cheng, 44, helped his family's small shoe business by selling slippers on the streets from a young age. The dynamics of street life later became the source of inspiration for Cheng's choreography.

In his piece, Multiplication, nine dancers, led by dancer-choreographer Duan Ni, who danced with Akram Khan Company in the United Kingdom and the New York-based company, Shen Wei Dance Arts, move in circles onstage with each one of them dancing in their own way.

Tao, who is known for naming his dance productions by the number of dancers featured in them, named the piece 12 because he worked with 12 dancers from Cloud Gate Dance Theater in Taipei.

Each of the dancers press themselves close to the floor frequently for turns and twists, which fade in and fade out. It was an idea inspired by the movement of clouds which Tao spent four hours observing during a trip to northern Europe a few years ago.