Editing Tiger Princess Dance Projects (section)

== About ==

Princess productions - yvonne ng,
artistic director, founder, choreographer, performer, educator

Born in Singapore, of Peranakan Chinese descent, Yvonne Ng came to Canada to get a sensible degree in the hospitality industry, but following her heart she left university on the Dean's list with an honours degree in Fine Arts, Dance. After a decade of dancing for Canada's best choreographers, Ng has created several choreographic works as commissions or for her company, tiger princess dance projects.  Yvonne's current focus is on creating discrete movement as symbols as opposed to choreographic vocabulary.  Writers describe her work as ravishing, paradoxical, immediate and hard-edged, like painful memory.
 
From a tutu to army boots
Born in Singapore of Peranakan Chinese descent, Ng began her training with Madam Goh Soo Khim at the Singapore Ballet Academy.  Even before completing her BFA at York University, she had co-founded the dance company, Dance Allegro and was in demand in the Toronto's contemporary dance community.  After a year in the Danny Grossman Dance Company, she left to work with choreographers such as Bill James, José Navas, Marie-Josée Chartier, and Peter Chin. Her commissioned choreography and performance have earned her eight Dora Mavor Moore nominations and taken her to Australia, Singapore, across Canada and the USA.
 
The Choreographer
Marking the start of her transition from a performer to choreographer, Ng traveled to Beijing to train and research Chinese traditional and minority dance forms, plus to study Arabic singing at the Beijing Dance Academy and Central University for Nationalities in 1996.  Her most renowned early work, a solo called Blue Jade (1998) used choreography that was created on a vertical plane then translated to the horizontal with the dancer's hips never leaving the floor.
 
The Art of the Constrained
The trio, Cypress in 2002 was Ng's first group work that constructed the choreography in an open studio and then later set constraints on the movement that gave rise to new movement and architectures of bodies.  Paula Citron of The Globe & Mail described the choreography as a weight bearing entanglement that gives rise to arresting images.  In Garam Shift, 2003, Ng used physical exhaustion as the constraint and in Serpentine Garden: another love story, created for Dusk Dances 2003, she devised costumes hooked to clotheslines for the two dancers.
 
Collection
2003 also marked the start of Collection, a series of choreographic self-portraits choreographed and performed (primarily) by Ng.
Collection #1: xiao bai chuan (2003) featured the music and performance of Lee Pui Ming and received rare rave reviews with the Toronto media and when it was performed in Halifax, Andrea Nemetz of the Chronicle Herald led off with "It was as if time stood still during Yvonne Ng's engrossing performance in the Dunn Theatre."
Collection #2: VoyAge (2004) is a meditation on the extent to which our personal history holds us.  The set and installation consists of approximately 100 pairs of Ng's shoes laid out in a labyrinth. Collection #2 features an improvised score for cello and voice by Anne Bourne and has been performed in Toronto & New York.
Collection #3: Headdress (2004) takes its name and inspiration from a Chinese opera headdress that is festooned with the flotsam of life.  It has been performed in Toronto and Newfoundland and is in development for a film project.
Collection #4: InVitation (2004) is the most casual work in this series.  It has been performed at several venues across Canada and is a crowd favourite.
Collection #5: Strings Attached (2007) was shown at the Halbritter Center for the Performing Arts in Pennsylvania, USA and was most recently performed at Toronto's Nuit Blanche.  A 200kg aluminum frame and 100m of cable forms a web.
Collection #6: 11:07 (2007) looks to the future.  The frailty of aged skin is represented by a delicate paper costume which is slowly shed in a ritualized choreography.
Trailer (2007) is a haiku of the six solos.  It takes aspects of each of the previous choreographies and remixed them into something unique.
The Larger Works
With the commission for the Toronto Dance Theatre, Ng's desire to choreograph on a larger group was realized.  In 2004, Batulang was created on eight dancers and featured at the Four at the Winch show in Toronto.  The works that followed were Scarlet's Room: Moss with four dancers from the Arts Fission Company in Singapore and four of Yvonne's Canadian dancers.  Scarlet's Room premiered at The Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay's Studio Series in 2005, and reviewers called it muscular, vigorous; a rich tapestry of ideas and eight very good dancers.
 
For 2006, Ng's Signs, an evening's work was presented at the Harbourfront Theatre, Toronto consisting of two separate but related works, Paper Women & Emerald Lies.  The works are for seven women and were inspired by memories of her life as a student in an all-girls Catholic school in Singapore.  The seven dancers in Paper Women wear almost sheer, white pleated tunics, with long sleeves. They look innocent and virginal. They flock together happily, chattering as they pick slips of paper from glass containers, their instructions, we are told, for the particular dance steps they will perform in each stage of this piece. Their movements are regimented: they frequently dance in a line moving upstage or downstage as if in a church ceremony or a schoolyard game. The music is a long drone, like an organ playing, overlaid with whispered phrases.  Emerald Lies is much more immediate and hard-edged, like painful memory. The same seven women are dressed in lurid colours that shimmer under dramatic lighting. The dancers form an enclosure around one of their number. She's a victim, imprisoned; then, against the richly emotional score, the victim becomes the idol and the enclosure becomes a temple.
 
Awards and Community
Recipient of the prestigious 2007 Ontario Premier's Emerging Artist Award, 1996 & 2003 Chalmers Performing Arts Training Award, 2003 Chalmers Arts Fellowship, 2003 New Pioneers Arts Award, and the 2002 K.M. Hunter Dance Award.  Yvonne Ng's intensity, grace, and mesmerizing presence have made her an unstoppable force on the Canadian and international dance scene.
 
Ng is an active member of the dance community having served on the board of Directors for the Canadian Alliance of Dance Artists and Dance Umbrella of Ontario.  Ng is the Artistic Director of Series 8:08 (since 1994), as well as the curator and presenter of dance: made in canada/fait au canada, both of which focus on career development opportunities for members of the dance community. She recently finished commissioned works for two Canadian universities and a work on the Toronto Dance Theatre in Toronto.  Yvonne has recently performed in Dublin, Ireland and in the Canadian cities of Peterborough, Guelph, St. John's, North Bay, Sudbury and Goose Bay.