TING-YU XIE ARTIST PORTFOLIO
Tingyu Xie is a Columbus-based choreographer, performer, and dance educator whose work brings Chinese cultural aesthetics into conversation with contemporary movement. Her choreography explores heritage, memory, spirituality, motherhood, and women’s lived experiences through physically expressive and emotionally resonant storytelling.
Xie holds an MFA in Dance from Case Western Reserve University and a B.S. in Physics from Southeast University in China. Trained across Chinese dance, ballet, jazz, modern, and contemporary forms, she has performed works by Pam Tanowitz, Larry Keigwin, Gary Galbraith, and Karen Potter. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University and studios across Cleveland, Columbus, and Seattle.
Her recent works include Escape, Ruach, Invisible Walls, Three Hours Radius, and Murmurs of Mural, an ensemble project inspired by the ancient Dunhuang murals. Her choreography has been presented at the OhioDance Festival, Kentucky Dance Festival, Ballet Legato’s ROOTS Choreographer Showcase, New Albany Dance Festival, and Dancing in Summer, the Festival!
Xie is the founder of TINGMOTION Dance & Wellness, where she develops new artistic work and builds community through movement.
Murmurs of Mural
Murmurs of Mural is an ongoing choreographic research and performance work inspired by the visual and spiritual language of the Dunhuang murals along the Silk Road, a network of ancient trade routes connecting civilizations across Eurasia.
Three Hours Radius
Three Hours Radius is a contemporary solo that gives voice to mothers who have experienced the isolating and often unseen darkness of the postpartum period. Inspired by the relentless three-hour cycle of feeding, pumping, washing bottles, and soothing a newborn, the work explores how a mother’s time, body, freedom, and sense of self can become fragmented by caregiving.
Escape
Escape is a contemporary solo dance work that traces the human impulse to break free. The piece moves between confinement and release, body and breath, memory and motion. Rooted in a practice that bridges physics, choreography, and cross-cultural identity, Escape approaches movement as both equation and emotion - a search for freedom that unfolds through suspension, gravity, and momentum.
Ruach
Ruach - the Hebrew word for “breath” and “spirit”—is an ensemble work tracing one figure’s spiritual awakening. Initially unaware of a higher presence surrounding her, she gradually transforms, recognizing and merging with the spirits. In the final image, they become her pathway, guiding and supporting each step forward.
