She built a technique rooted in her Chinese heritage, founded a New York-based dance company, and has created work for some of the world’s most respected companies — from Martha Graham to Philadelphia Ballet. Yue Yin brings her practice to IAB Barcelona’s third-year Contemporary Dance students for their final sow, MOMENTOS 2026.
Yue Yin is a choreographer, artistic director, and the creator of FoCo Technique™ – an original movement vocabulary that blends Chinese classical and folk dance with contemporary movement language, shaped by her own experience as an immigrant artist navigating multiple cultural worlds. In 2018, she founded YYDC (Yue Yin Dance Company), a New York-based non-profit dedicated to the performance and teaching of her work. The company has been commissioned by an extraordinary range of institutions, from the Martha Graham Dance Company and Philadelphia Ballet to the Juilliard School and NYU Tisch – and has performed at festivals across the US, Germany, Serbia, and Italy.
For their final show, Yue Yin joined IAB Barcelona as guest choreographer for the third-year Contemporary Dance students, bringing a new work — and a technique unlike anything most of them have encountered before.
The Piece: Explosive, Precise, and Deliberately Compact
The work she is creating at IAB is called Chase – an excerpt from Elsewhere, a full-length production that premiered in New York City as part of the 92NY Women Move the World season. The score is an original composition by Alexandre Dai Castaing, and this particular section was named for its defining quality: high energy, fast-moving, relentless.
The excerpt is dense with movement references. Layered into the choreography are elements of contemporary dance alongside Chinese classical dance, Mongolian and Tibetan dance traditions, and aesthetic influences from Southeast Asia – a concentration of the very multicultural vocabulary that defines FoCo Technique™. For the one week she has with IAB’s third-year students, Yue Yin sees it as the ideal vehicle to introduce her movement language in its full complexity.
“It’s short, it’s powerful, explosive — and it packs in a lot of steps and choreography and energy,” she says. What looks like a compact excerpt is, on closer inspection, an entire artistic world in miniature.
→ Related Reading: History of Contemporary Dance: Exploring the Origins Around the World
FoCo Technique™: A Vocabulary Born from Two Worlds
At the heart of Yue Yin’s practice is FoCo Technique™ – a system she developed initially as a practical tool for her own company, to help communicate her choreographic vocabulary to dancers efficiently. Over time, it evolved into a full training methodology used in teaching, commission work, and creative residencies.
The name is a compression of “folk-contemporary” – and the technique is precisely that: rooted in the Chinese folk and classical dance training Yue Yin received growing up in China, fused with the movement language of contemporary Western dance. What makes it distinctive, she says, is what it allows her to do in the studio: bring together dancers from very different backgrounds and, through a shared vocabulary, generate a unified emotional and physical experience on stage.
“I’m able to have dancers from different backgrounds, different experiences, somehow experience a similar movement, a similar emotional charge on stage,” she says. “That’s where it gave me a nice roots foundation.“
In 2024, she certified two long-time collaborators – Grace Whitworth and Nat Wilson – as the first two official FoCo Technique™ instructors in the world, a deliberate step towards sharing the form with a wider generation of dancers.
→ Related Reading: 9 Contemporary Dance Companies You Should Be Following
Still Searching: An Artist Who Refuses to Repeat Herself
Ask Yue Yin where she is in her artistic development, and her answer is immediate and honest: still searching.
She describes looking back at her earlier work through the lens of social media – videos from productions that felt completely resolved at the time – and being struck by how much her movement has grown and shifted since then.
“At the time, it feels very solidified,” she says. “But now thinking, oh wow, it has grown.“
Rather than returning to successful formulas, she actively resists repetition. Each commission, each collaboration, each new room of dancers opens a different path.
“I do feel like it’s the privilege of being able to have the opportunity to explore, to research — just finding, without feeling the fear of having to make it no matter what.“
It’s a philosophy that runs counter to the logic of much of the industry, where success tends to generate pressure to reproduce itself.
What She Would Tell Graduating Students
Yue Yin’s advice for students on the edge of entering the professional world is direct – and comes from watching them in the rehearsal room.
“Don’t be afraid,” she says first. Then: “Stay honest. Stay true to what you feel you want to do.“
The longer version of the advice is about sustainability. She sees many young dancers measuring success in terms of money, fame, and market visibility, and building their artistic choices around what seems popular or commercially viable. It’s a trap, she believes, that shortens careers.
“Artistic development doesn’t really get measured the same for everyone,” she says. “In order to survive in the business for a longer period of time, you have to find something you believe in and love. Something you are able to do repetitively, tirelessly, and with full engagement.“
Chasing the market, chasing popularity, chasing success as an end in itself — these, she suggests, are paths that tend not to lead where dancers hope they will.
The title of the piece she’s making at IAB — Chase — takes on a different resonance in light of this. The piece is about speed and pursuit. The advice is about knowing what is actually worth chasing.
→ Related Reading: Beyond the Company: Career Paths for Contemporary Dancers
Yue Yin is a choreographer, artistic director of YYDC, and creator of FoCo Technique™, based in New York City. She is currently working with IAB Barcelona’s third-year Contemporary Dance students on her piece, Chase, an excerpt from the full-length production Elsewhere.
Interview by Graduating Zeb Díaz
Article by Sara Barbieri
Videography by Roger Bayerri
