By Geluo Liang
There’s something quietly disorienting about watching a work by Chinese artist Gehao Zhang. It’s not the shock of spectacle that unsettles, but the slow erosion of temporal and spatial coherence—as if the body in motion were being reprogrammed before our eyes, and the performance space stretched into something elastic, unstable, and deeply interior.
Zhang’s choreography resists resolution. Rather than seeking fluency or visual polish, his works thrive on disruption—on glitches, pauses, and subtle errors that refuse to smooth over. In a performance culture that often values virtuosity and precision, Zhang turns instead toward fragmentation. His choreography proposes that truth might reside not in flow but in fracture.
This aesthetic is vividly realized in The Dream of Night, a dance film where the performer doesn’t simply move through space but through recursive layers of her own image—mirrored, projected, delayed. The interaction between the dancer and the projection is not decorative; it’s dialectical. The screen resists. The image fractures. The real and the virtual fold into each other, and what unfolds is not a narrative but a sensation—a delicate confrontation between presence and disappearance.
What Zhang creates is not a glitch as mistake, but glitch as method. His choreography is built on interruptions—temporal delays, visual ruptures, incomplete phrases—that compel the body to react in real time. This compositional unpredictability becomes its own kind of score, one that demands an alert, vulnerable responsiveness from the performer.
In WE ARE, a film adaptation of a previous stage work created during the pandemic, the aesthetic of fragmentation intensifies. Shot in stark black and white, the film features a lone male dancer drifting through narrow architectural frames. The camera doesn’t simply record; it participates. It jolts, lingers, veers away, embedding its own instability into the choreographic field. The dancer, suspended in grayscale liminality, is less protagonist than presence—haunted, refracted, edged by uncertainty.
Zhang choreographs distance with an unusual tenderness. Movements linger just past completion. A hand reaches without landing. A turn stalls mid-spiral. These gestures accumulate like memory—partial, elusive, embodied more than explained. His dancers do not assert themselves on space; they dissolve into it, bend around it, wait for it to rupture.
There is an intimacy in Zhang’s refusal of clarity. He does not push toward resolution or narrative payoff. Instead, he builds a world in which movement behaves more like thought or dream—cyclical, nonlinear, sometimes contradictory. The viewer is not told what to feel. We are asked to follow the residue of gesture, to listen to what is withheld.
To call his work “experimental” or “new media choreography” would be too reductive. Zhang isn’t chasing innovation for its own sake. Rather, his use of projection, distortion, and filmic tools feels like a natural extension of his choreographic language—a way to expose the body to its own fragmentation and to invite the viewer into that same fragile perceptual state.
What remains striking across Zhang’s body of work is his commitment to the unstable. His dancers do not move to impress, but to navigate. They stumble, suspend, recover, hesitate. Their virtuosity lies in responsiveness, not control. And in that, Zhang finds something profoundly human: not perfection, but adaptation; not clarity, but attention.
In an era when movement is often designed to dazzle, Zhang’s choreography reminds us to attend to the moments that falter—the ones that resist form, that linger in delay, that refuse to resolve. His work lives not in the spectacle of motion, but in the quiet rupture of becoming.
Published by Anne C.
