Toad Mountain | Work-in-Progress by Jie-Hung Connie Shiau

Experience the culmination of Jie-Hung Connie Shiau's Dance Residency at the Arts Center at Governors Island. Jie-Hung Connie Shiau’s Toad Mountain draws on Taiwanese folklore to explore the hidden interior spaces where we store memory, silence, instinct, and grief, the pieces of ourselves we preserve, protect, or abandon in the name of self-preservation, some by conscious choice and others slowly, invisibly, over time. Folklore has long served as a vessel for what a society cannot always speak aloud, and Shiau’s process returns to those mythic landscapes not as nostalgia but as mirrors, an attempt to uncover where we hide, what we bury, and what we might finally be ready to release and reconcile. Jie-Hung Connie Shiau is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher based in New York City. Raised in Tainan, Taiwan. Shiau has presented works at Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s 43rd virtual season, New Choreographer Project in Taipei, Taiwan, Loyola University, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago summer intensives, SUNY Purchase College, Little Island Dance Festival, Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, Arts On Site, Abrons Arts Center, and Summer For The City at Lincoln Center. This work-in-progress showing marks the culmination of Shiau’s Arts Center Dance Residency. LMCC’s Dance Residencies are made possible by support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. Learn more about the Dance Residency program here. Photo by Jesse Obremskie.