TONGDANCE
Xiaoyi Tong is a choreographer, dance artist, educator and producer working across the UK and China. Her practice spans contemporary dance, dance theatre and interdisciplinary performance, with a particular interest in physical language, theatricality,classical ballt and the ways movement can hold emotional and cultural experience. She is mostly based in the UK, legally, on a Global Talent visa.
For Tong, dance is not only about making a great work, getting the movement right, or delivering an impressive performance. Whether working as a dancer or choreographer, she keeps returning to a more fundamental question: why do we dance? Why do certain things need to happen through dance? What can only be experienced, understood or expressed through the body and through making dance?
These questions continue to drive her curiosity and motivation to create, as well as shaping the way she enters a performance as a dancer. In the studio, she can be playful and light-hearted, serious and rigorous, emotional or mechanical, meticulously planned or completely lost. For Tong, finding an answer through dance is less important than finding a question she genuinely wants to ask.
As an independent choreographer, Tong’s research and creation have been supported by Arts Council England and the Bonnie Bird Choreography Fund, alongside collaborations with a wide range of artists and organisations. Her works include Emptiness: Floating Through Molasses, Boundary and Drifting, and have been presented at venues including Dance City Newcastle, Bush Theatre, Sheffield Theatres and Shanghai International Dance Center.In 2025, she was selected for the Innopraktika Choreography Session in St Petersburg, where she created a new work with graduating dancers from the Boris Eifman Ballet Academy.
In China, Tong has also worked across opera and musical theatre productions as a movement director and . Alongside her independent practice, she has worked with Karma Dance CIC since 2022, becoming a Director in 2025, and has collaborated with Karma Dance and India Dance on professional productions, artistic research and community-based projects exploring mental health, race and disability.
Xiaoyi trained professionally in classical ballet for seven years at Shanghai Dance School, before studying choreography for four years at Beijing Dance Academy. She later completed an MA at Northern School of Contemporary Dance, graduating with Distinction. Moving between rigorous classical training, choreographic study and contemporary practice has given her a particular interest in how established physical languages can be questioned, transformed and made personal.
Tong also enjoys connecting with people through teaching, using it as a way to share and further understand her own practice. As a Guest Tutor at Northern School of Contemporary Dance, she teaches contemporary technique, and she has worked as a Guest Choreographer at Leeds Beckett University. She has also led workshops as a practitioner with Kakilang in London, while continuing to create contemporary solos for ballet students in China.
Tong simply loves to dance and perform！！Her international performance experience has taken her from Berlin to Mexico, including performances at FRAMED Festival, Teatro Benito Juárez and Teatro Macedonio Alcalá. Her ongoing collaboration with Annick Schadeck has involved research and performance projects across Germany and Luxembourg, including Hamburger Kunsthalle and Banannefabrik.
Tong has also developed an ongoing collaboration with Darren Johnston, taking part in his research and development at Sadler’s Wells East. In the UK, she has performed for New Earth Theatre and Theatre in the Mill, and in Brighter Still, created by Emily Lim and Dan Canham for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, alongside extensive performance work with Karma Dance CIC.
When she has time away from work, Tong enjoys being alone — but that does not mean she lacks ambition when it comes to cultural exchange. Quite the opposite. Having worked across the UK, Europe, China, Japan and South korea. she is curious about what happens when people with different cultural backgrounds, training and ways of making come together.
Over the years, Tong has worked in both directions: bringing Chinese work to international stages, including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, while developing international ballet and contemporary dance projects and galas in China. Through these projects, she brings together artists from different countries and young dancers in China, creating opportunities to encounter different creative processes, training approaches and working cultures.
Having developed her own practice between Chinese and British cultural contexts, Tong is interested in what becomes visible when different ways of making and understanding dance meet. Rather than treating either as a fixed standard, she sees these encounters as opportunities to question, exchange and continually reshape her own understanding of dance, the body and people.