“Lei Dance Theater” was actually inspirited by the name of “Hsin-Lei Dance Company”, which was founded in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, we averagely create 1 or 2 works every year. We are trying hard to create a kind of art that owns our unique style and form. However, we don’t limit our works in eastern or western forms, because we are still trying to find the best way to tell our stories. Our created works include ancient Chinese legendary tales such as “Journey to the West” in 2012 and “The White Snake” in 2013, “Travel through Time” in 2014 or Western classic fairy tales like “The Dreams” in 2013 and “The Villains” in 2015. In addition, we also tried to explore the deeper culture value of Taiwan and collect the beautiful sceneries of Taiwan, and to express it through dancer’s body; therefore, we made “Hello Taiwan” in 2015. Back then, it was more of our experimental phase, however, through various experiments, we have finally get to the point that we indeed find our own unique dance form and style, which only belongs to “Lei Dance Theater.”

In 2016, “Lei Dance Theater” has finally come to life. The combination of the three words in Chinese, 艸雨田, makes the word “Lei”, which comes from Hsin-Lei s Lei, to commemorate Hsin-Lei Dance Company’s founder, Professor Yu-Ying Wang. Being the Executive Director and Producer of “Lei Dance Theater”, Alison Liu always has a faith to enhance her mother’s dance education ideals as well as last her mother’s enthusiasm about classic folk dance. Alison Liu, therefore, has made up her mind that she wants to create a professional dance group in her home town, Hsin-Chu.

After seven years education in USA, graduating from Tepper Business School in Carnegie Mellon University and getting Master of Art degree in Taipei National University of the Arts in 2018, Alison Liu has worked hard on bridging the connection between “dance education” and “dance creation.” She is good at integrating all resources she has got, and making Lei Dance Theater a place where gathers a group of young artists who regard being professional performers as their career goal.

“Lei Dance Theater” is not only producing art works every year, but also working hard to develop our own training techniques to train our performers. It is also a place that uses various methods to train dancers to convey messages through their body movements. Currently, there are 18 great dancers in Lei Dance Theater, age from 18 to 32. Our training program is very rigorous, besides working with choreographers, dancers all have to take ballet, modern, and all kinds of Chinese classic and folk dance courses in order for their body to be acceptable for all possibilities. Lei Dance Theater has tried extremely hard to gather great choreographers and artists working together. While we attempt to create new dance movements, we care to preserve the original spirit of folk dance. Through our work, it’s not just simple choreography; it’s more about what we want to say to the society, to the world, we try to talk through performer’s body movements, using the most fundamental tool, our body, to tell stories.

Because we believe that while we are going oversea further and further, we still have to keep our Taiwanese’s pride and individuality. Now we produce at least 1 complete new work every year, our audience is also increasing day by day. We will keep working harder and harder to let our works be seen by more people, by the world.