Yvonne Ng |黄碧琬 (B.F.A., M.A.) is a dancer, choreographer, artistic director, curator, and arts educator. She is the Artistic Director and creative instigator of tiger princess dance projects, an artist-led organization she founded in 1996, and the founding director of the biennial dance: made in canada / fait au canada Festival, established in 2001 to present contemporary dance from across Canada.
Of Peranakan Chinese descent, Yvonne was born and raised in Singapore and has lived in Canada since the late 1980s. She completed her B.F.A. (Honours, Dean’s Award for Excellence) and M.A. in Dance at York University, where her graduate research focused on evaluating and developing arts-based intergenerational practice connecting older adults and youth.
As a choreographer and performer, Yvonne’s work is recognized for its finely crafted physicality, perceptual inquiry, and deep attention to relationship. Her choreography invites multiple ways of seeing, unfolding through layered structures that value listening, presence, and the subtle negotiations between bodies, space, and audience. Commissioned works and performances have earned multiple Dora Mavor Moore Award nominations and been presented across Canada and internationally, including Australia, China, Ireland, Italy, Singapore, and the United States.
Her artistic practice has evolved through decades of collaboration with remarkable artists and mentors. Alongside formative experiences with Peter Chin, Dominique Dumais, Deborah Hay, Tedd Robinson, José Navas, and Menaka Thakkar, long-term work with Bill James through his company, Atlas Moves Watching, profoundly shaped her understanding of observation, attention, and improvisation. More recently, her ongoing artistic dialogue with Marie-Josée Chartier has further deepened her choreographic and dramaturgical practice, reinforcing an approach that values curiosity, multiplicity, and the emergence of meaning through relationship.
Yvonne’s artistic practice is inseparable from her commitment to education and knowledge exchange. Yvonne is a certified Open Source Forms© practitioner, Dance for Dementia facilitator (NBS / Baycrest Health Sciences Sharing Dance Seniors), Ashtanga Yoga teacher, and has trained in Partners for Youth Empowerment Creative Facilitation, Dance for PD®, C-I Training™, Senior Fitness (CCAA), and functional anatomy with Irene Dowd. She has taught at universities and training institutions in Canada, the United States, and Singapore.
Ng is the recipient of the 2022 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts (Canada Council for the Arts), the Muriel Sherrin Award, the Jacqueline Lemieux Prize, the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, and other honours. She continues to work across creation, presentation, and education, with a focus on intergenerational exchange, care-based artistic practice, and performance as a site of relationship.
yvonne ng || 黄碧琬, B.F.A., M.A.
Artistic Practice
I make choreography as a practice of attention.
I try to remain open to more than one way of seeing. Understanding rarely arrives all at once; it takes patience, attention, and time. Rather than rushing toward conclusions, I return to people, places, and experiences, staying with them long enough for something deeper to emerge. Choreography has become one way I continue this practice of paying attention.
Movement is my primary language, but my work begins long before I enter the studio. It grows from observation, participation, and an ongoing curiosity about how we relate to one another, how meaning emerges through relationship, and how perception shifts according to where—and how—we look.
Rather than illustrating ideas or telling stories, I create conditions in which performers and audiences can experience curiosity, ambiguity, and discovery together. I am interested in works that remain open—where multiple interpretations can coexist, and meaning is continually shaped rather than fixed.
My practice has evolved over more than three decades through performance, teaching, improvisation, and long-term artistic collaboration. Open Source Forms®, developed by Stephanie Skura, has profoundly influenced my understanding of the body, perception, and compositional thinking. Equally formative were my many years of working with Bill James/Atlas Moves Watching, where observation, attentiveness, and improvisation became central to my choreographic practice. Ongoing dialogue with dramaturg and choreographer Marie-Josée Chartier continues to deepen my artistic inquiry, encouraging an openness to complexity and the emergence of meaning through relationship rather than certainty.
My Peranakan Chinese heritage, my upbringing in Singapore, and my life in Canada have also shaped the way I understand the world. Rather than treating culture as a subject, these lived experiences inform how I perceive relationships, space, time, and belonging.
Whether creating for professional dancers, community participants, older adults, or intergenerational groups, I return to the same questions: How do we notice? How do we listen with the body? What becomes possible when we make space for multiple ways of seeing?
Ultimately, I think of choreography not simply as the arrangement of movement, but as the cultivation of shared attention.
