Anna Xu  About Work Contact

Anna Xu is a dancer and composer based in California. Her work explores wonder, perception, and mysticism through immersive, multisensorial experiences. She composes and performs contemporary dance and experimental music under the performance moniker Xola. She also curates and produces Ecotones, public art events featuring site-specific, multidisciplinary art performances in nature by artists of color.

For her artistic practice, she was selected as a Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s Creative Dissent Fellow. She has performed at Joe Goode Annex, Project Artaud, ODC Theater, Real Time & Space, and Performance Primers. For her curatorial work, she has been supported by Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s New and Experimental Works Program, Zellerbach Family Foundation’s Community Arts Program, Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure, and Hope Mohr Dance/The Bridge Project’s Artist Council. She has presented Ecotones at Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in collaboration with Beatriz Escobar and East Bay Regional Park District.

Her practice is informed by Daoist mysticism, maurya kerr’s durational improvisation of the imagination, Nelson Chu’s taiji 傅氏太极拳 and bagua 傅氏八卦掌, Hui Liu’s qigong 大雁气功, Ranko Ogura’s Noguchi Taiso のぐちたいそう, gizeh muñiz vengel’s contemporary floorwork, TAO Dance Theater’s circular movement system 圆运动体系, and Aurora Tang’s High Desert Test Sites (2011-2015).

Portrait by Miriam Medellín Myers

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