Jodey (Zhihan) Yang’s approach to choreography begins with a discipline most artists skip: she arrives at a site before the movement does, listening to its soundscape, light, textures, and rhythms until the environment reveals what kind of work it can hold—and only then does she begin to choreograph with it rather than in it. Across site-specific performances, award-winning dance films, and public commissions at institutions like LACMA and New York Fashion Week, her practice offers a precise model for how movement, camera, and place can collaborate to make audiences see familiar environments as though for the first time.
Jodey (Zhihan) Yang develops choreography at the intersection of dance, film, and environmental performance, treating landscapes, architecture, and public spaces as active elements in the creative process. Rather than using location as a visual backdrop, Jodey approaches place as a collaborator that shapes movement, visual tone, audience attention, and narrative structure.
Her work reflects a wider shift in contemporary performance, where site-specific dance, screendance, and environmental dance expand choreography beyond the traditional stage. These practices connect movement with ecology, cinema, architecture, and public space, showing how the body can help audiences reconsider familiar environments.
Jodey’s interdisciplinary background supports this approach, with training at Beijing Dance Academy, California Institute of the Arts, and NYU Tisch, where she continues to develop her practice in film and television. Her resume also shows extensive experience as a choreographer, artistic director, filmmaker, performer, cinematographer, editor, and producer across dance films, festivals, museums, fashion presentations, and site-specific works.
As this interview begins, readers are welcomed into Jodey’s creative world through the personal and professional journey that shaped her approach to movement. Her path from formal dance training to choreography and filmmaking offers a natural starting point for understanding how she began to see movement not only as something designed for the stage, but as a language that can live within landscapes, architecture, public spaces, and the camera frame.
I think the transition happened quite naturally because every stage of my education exposed me to a different artistic environment. As I kept creating and experimenting, I also had more opportunities to work across different mediums.
At CalArts, I made my first dance films and collaborated with film students, and that experience completely changed the way I thought about storytelling. What excites me about film is that it gives movement so much more freedom.
It can exist across different spaces, different locations, and different perspectives, and it can reach audiences far beyond a theater. For me, cinema amplifies what I love most about dance: its immediate emotional impact and its ability to communicate beyond language.
At the same time, film has always been deeply personal to me. Growing up, I was constantly inspired by films that moved me emotionally and helped me understand people and the world with greater empathy and resilience.
Those experiences made me want to create that feeling for others. Ultimately, what keeps me committed to filmmaking is that it brings me closer to life itself.
Compared to the stage, cinema allows movement to live within real environments and everyday moments, and that is where I am most interested in continuing my artistic exploration.
I never think of the environment as a container for performance. I see it as an active collaborator in the creative process.
Before rehearsals, I always spend time at the site without rushing into choreography. I simply stay there and experience it.
I pay attention to the changing light, the sounds, the flow of people, the textures of the ground, and anything the space naturally offers that might become part of the work. I am interested in listening to the site before asking it to support my ideas.
Because of that, many of the movements are not fully choreographed in advance. They are discovered through improvisation and through a dialogue between my body and the environment.
The space does not just hold the performance; it actively shapes the choreography, influencing how I move, where I move, and even why I move in a particular way. One example is my site-specific work Underground at Exposition Park in Los Angeles.
I was performing with a long, retractable silver tube, and while exploring the park, I noticed several irregular stone formations scattered across the lawn. Rather than treating them as background elements, I began choreographing with them.
The stones determined where I could disappear, where I could re-emerge, and how the audience would experience the performance. Moving between the stones or appearing on top of them transformed the relationship between my body and the object.
What fascinated me was that the stones gave the silver tube an entirely new context and meaning. They made the movement feel more intentional and more emotionally charged.
At the same time, the movement and the object also transformed how people perceived the stones. Something that had simply been part of the landscape suddenly became an active presence within the work.
That reciprocal relationship is what interests me most about site-specific performance. Ultimately, I do not want the audience to feel that a dance is simply happening in a particular place.
I want them to feel that this work could only exist in this place. If I can move the piece somewhere else and nothing changes, then I know I have not listened carefully enough to the site.
The relationship between the dancer and the camera creates a new rhythm, almost like a shared breath. The camera responds to movement, but it also influences movement.
Then, through editing, another layer of rhythm, meaning, and emotional momentum is created. The choreography does not end when the performance ends; it continues in the editing process.
What changes most is the relationship between the body and the environment. On stage, a dancer physically occupies a space, and the audience is free to choose where to look.
In film, the camera shapes that relationship. Through framing, distance, perspective, and movement, it decides how the audience experiences the body within the environment.
A close-up can make a small gesture feel monumental, while a wide shot can reveal how fragile or isolated a body is within a landscape. The camera becomes another choreographic tool.
Because of that, creating dance for film is much more layered and complex for me. I am no longer only thinking about the dancer’s movement.
I am also choreographing the movement of the camera, the relationship between the camera and the body, the rhythm created through editing, and how all of these elements work together to tell a story. That is what excites me most about working between choreography and filmmaking.
I am not trying to bring audiences somewhere extraordinary. Instead, I am interested in helping them rediscover the extraordinary within the places they already inhabit every day.
Through my work, I hope to give familiar spaces and ordinary objects new meanings. Even creating a small sense of unfamiliarity or freshness can encourage people to pause and look again at things they usually overlook.
I am more interested in asking questions. If the work can encourage someone to reconsider their relationship with nature, public space, or even the ordinary routines of daily life, then I feel it has created a meaningful experience.
Ultimately, I hope my work invites people to re-examine the things they have become so accustomed to that they no longer truly see them.
I think these two mediums will always create fundamentally different experiences, and that is exactly why each of them has its own unique strengths that the other can never replace. What I find most rewarding is that filmmaking demands a different level of precision from me as a creator.
When I move from the language of contemporary dance into cinema, I have to examine every artistic decision much more carefully. Through the camera, there is nowhere to hide.
Every frame, every movement, every transition has to be intentional. In many ways, filmmaking challenges me to articulate my artistic intentions more clearly than I ever could in live performance alone.
Rather than seeing film as a documentation of dance, I see it as another creative language. It does not replace the live experience; it reveals different emotional layers and creates new meanings that only cinema can achieve.
Every environment has its own rhythm, its own energy, and its own audience. For example, at New York Fashion Week, the audience’s attention moves much more quickly.
The energy is fast-paced and constantly shifting, so the movement has to communicate more directly and immediately. In a museum, however, the atmosphere naturally encourages people to slow down.
Visitors often have more time to observe, reflect, and return to a work from different perspectives. That allows me to create something more subtle and layered.
I try to respond to the rhythm of each environment and each audience so that the work can communicate as clearly and honestly as possible.
The first thing I do when I arrive at a new location is slow down and listen. Before I begin thinking about choreography, I spend time simply experiencing the space.
I am especially interested in sound. The soundscape of a place changes throughout the day, and each moment has its own rhythm and frequency.
I like to experience the site at different times because those subtle changes often affect how I respond physically. Rather than arriving with fixed choreography, I begin improvising within the space.
Those improvisations help me discover movements, images, and unexpected moments that can later develop into the work. I am not looking for finished choreography at that stage; I am looking for possibilities.
As I spend more time in the environment, the emotional tone of the place gradually reveals itself. That atmosphere becomes the foundation for the visual language and overall tone of the piece.
One example is my first environmental dance work, which was created beside a river. The river was incredibly clean and shallow, and the water flowed quietly with the wind toward the ocean.
There was something about the calmness and continuous transformation of that landscape that reminded me of metamorphosis. After discussing that feeling with my costume designer, we developed a costume made from translucent plastic materials.
To me, it represented a living creature shedding its old skin and growing into a new form. As I moved, the material produced its own sounds, adding another layer of rhythm and texture to the piece.
In that sense, the costume did not simply visualize the concept; it also became part of the choreography and the soundscape. For me, nature is never just a backdrop.
The landscape, the weather, the sounds, the materials, and even the atmosphere all become collaborators in the creative process. They do not simply inspire the work; they actively shape what the work becomes.
As I continue developing my work, what excites me most is not simply creating more environmental dance or more films. It is discovering new ways that movement can help us reconnect with the physical world, with one another, and with ourselves.
For me, the body and movement are not only artistic mediums; they are powerful and deeply creative ways of telling stories. They have become the artistic language that defines my practice and my unique voice as a filmmaker and choreographer.
Unlike spoken language, movement can communicate emotion across cultures, backgrounds, and even languages. It reaches people on an instinctive and emotional level.
Looking ahead, I hope to continue using movement as the foundation of my storytelling while expanding the scale and possibilities of that language through cinema and site-specific work. Ultimately, I want to tell stories that connect with emotions we all share as human beings: love, loss, transformation, belonging, fear, hope, and resilience.
Jodey’s work demonstrates how environmental dance and film can expand the function of choreography from performance composition into spatial inquiry, cinematic storytelling, and public engagement. Across her answers, a consistent method emerges: she studies a site before imposing movement on it, treats the camera as a choreographic partner, and uses editing, framing, sound, costume, texture, and audience behavior as part of the work’s structure.
Her practice reflects a wider movement in contemporary dance toward interdisciplinary creation, where choreography is shaped not only by bodies but also by landscapes, architecture, ecology, technology, and the social rhythms of public space. By positioning movement inside real environments and translating those encounters through cinema, Jodey offers a precise and accessible model for how dance can help audiences see familiar places with renewed attention and understand the physical world as an active participant in artistic meaning.
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