Luying Xu was born in Kunming, China, where the city is full of ethnic cultural atmosphere and where most of China’s ethnic dances orignate from. Therefore, she began to learn dance at the age of five and embarked on her dance journey. During the six years of entering a professional dance school in the first stage, she participated in a performance directed by the choreographer of the Spring Festival Gala and played many important roles. In the 2016 University Student Art Festival competition, she served as the lead actor and won the gold medal, accumulating rich performance experiences. Later, with the fourth place in the Yunnan art examination ranking and the third place in the dance choreography ranking, she entered the four-year undergraduate dance programme.

During her four years of undergraduate study, she chose to major in dance choreography and began to study various small ethnic dance genres that are intangible cultural heritages. She followed her undergraduate tutor to go deep into villages to learn folk dances and extract dance vocabulary for choreography. Later, she recorded the dance teaching demonstration for the Taoli Cup.

At the time of graduating from undergraduate studies, she received the honor of an outstanding graduation dance creation work. During the undergraduate study period, she entered the studio of outstanding dance performers and choreographers in Yunnan Province and has four years of dance work experience, mainly teaching children’s dance and art examinees. She participated in choreographing the dance program of the Yunnan Children’s Spring Festival Gala. Later, she served as the dance choreographer of the public welfare film “Five Beams of Sunshine” and participated in the shooting of the opening credits. After the end of undergraduate studies, in order to develop her own dance style, she has joined Emergence to furhter her study.

Photo credit: Josh Hawkins