Help Fund Xin Ying's MFA Thesis Performance

My name is Xin Ying. I'm a Martha Graham principal dancer, a choreographer and an MFA candidate at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Last year, Tisch chose four established artists to pioneer a new full-time MFA in dance focused on collaboration and self-directed research. I am honored to be a part of this program, and I'm asking for your help funding my thesis project, which will premiere in April 2025!

About me:

I trained in traditional Chinese folk dance and graduated from the Nanjing University of Arts with a degree in choreography. In 2010, I took a sabbatical from my job teaching dance at a university in Sichuan to study for a semester at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

I had no prior modern dance training and knew very little English, but I immediately loved the Graham technique and felt empowered by the strong women in her work. Graham's characters are deeply human and express the full range of emotions, from happiness and joy to grief, jealousy, and despair - completely different from the one-dimensional female characters I grew up portraying.

Before returning to China, I auditioned for Graham's student company (Graham II) and to my surprise, I was hired as a part-time dancer. A year later, I was invited to join the Graham Company. The rest is history.

In my 10+ years as a Graham dancer, I've performed her work and taught her technique around the world. I've seen firsthand how Graham impacts dancers and audiences, regardless of who they are, where they were born, or what language they speak.

I care deeply about preserving her legacy and continuing to make Graham accessible, drawing in new audiences. That is why a key focus of my MFA work includes exploring new ways to interact with her work and using technology to reimagine some of her iconic works.

About my thesis project, "Letter from Nobody":

"Letter from Nobody" is a ~15-minute live piece inspired by Graham's "Letter to the World" from 1940, in which she portrayed Emily Dickinson onstage while another cast member recited Dickinson's poetry:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

I am drawn to this work because I am nobody to Martha. I never had the chance to meet her or see her in person. As dance relies primarily on live performance and the movement of bodies, Martha is also a nobody to me in a sense. She exists through her incredible archive and the countless performances of her work by dancers over the last century.

Through "Letter From Nobody", I am exploring this relationship, using archival footage of Martha performing and new technology to create a solo “with” Martha - a pair of nobodies.

I am excited to share that this work will premiere in April 2025 at the Joyce Theater.

The cost of staging a work like this in NYC is around $50-100k on the low end, which accounts for paying dancers and all collaborators (including the technologist handling the video, musicians, lighting designer, etc.), rehearsal space and equipment rental, costume design and production.

Thanks to the support of NYU and the Graham Company, we have space and most equipment covered.

Your donations will be used to pay my incredible collaborators for their time, expertise, and energy to bring this piece to life.

Donations of any amount will be invited to attend an open rehearsal of Letter From Nobody. Those who donate over $500 will be invited as my guests to the premiere in April 2025.

Thank you for your support and stay tuned for more as I develop "Letter From Nobody"!

Cover photo credit:

Left: Ying by Rod Brayman;

Right: Martha in Letter to the World by Barbara Morgan