Taipei Travel

Tsai Jui-yueh is a pioneer who devoted her life to the Taiwanese modern dance. Born in Tainan City in 1921, she learned the basics of dancing from Ishii Baku, the Japanese “father of modern dance”, before committing herself to introducing modern dance into Taiwan. She was revered as “ the mother of Taiwanese modern dance” because of her 500-odd productions that cover genres ranging from ballet to folk dances of all ethnicities; the productions she helped inspired include: “The Song of India” and “We Love Our Taiwan”. The historic structure of Tsai Jui-yueh Dance Research Institute was one of the tens of dormitories for Japanese colonial officials built around 1925 on Zhongshan N. Rd. and downtown Taipei; they were mostly wooden, Japanese-style duplexes. In 1953, Tsai purchased this former residence of a Japanese “Haninkan” official, with part of the house designated for choreographic rehearsals. She went on to convert it into a dance studio. In 1999, scholars insisted that Tsai’s dance studio, once destroyed in a fire and coveted by real estate developers, should be restored as a historic site in homage to Taiwanese modern dance.