About
Xu Yanzhe is a dance artist, choreographer, educator and researcher.
She holds a BFA in Dance Education from Beijing Dance Academy and an MA in Arts Pedagogy and Practice from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Her practice moves across choreography, teaching and research.
Over four years as a teacher of a professional youth dance troupe at Shenzhen Senior High School, she developed a sustained body of choreographic work in contemporary ballet and contributed at the national level to curriculum development for dance education in China, including editorial work for the Youth Dance Mind-Body Teaching Method and the MOE-issued Teaching Reference for Dance Teachers.
Her research is positioned at the intersection of pedagogy, embodiment and technology—investigating how choreographic practice and movement learning are transformed through digital tools, and how pedagogical approaches can deepen the ways dancers internalise and express movement.
She is interested in the broader question of what shapes a dancer's artistic growth, and how teaching can move beyond technical training to cultivate genuine perception, creativity and ownership of one's own body.
Yanzhe's work is defined by a commitment to excellence in both practice and pedagogy—rigorous, reflective and grounded in the dancer's lived experience.
Designing Laban-informed pedagogical activities to support children's meaning-making and expressive qualities: a case study
This qualitative case study investigates how Laban-informed pedagogical activities support the development of expressive qualities in a seven-year-old child‘s dance practice.
Three two-hour workshops were conducted over three weeks, structured around Laban’s Movement Qualities—Weight, Time, Space, and Flow—and integrated movement exploration, drawing, story association and Movement Quality cards.
Data included video recordings, interviews, artwork, emoji reflections and teacher-researcher logs. Thematic analysis identified four dimensions of change: learner agency, body awareness, meaning-making and expressive qualities.
The participant shifted from deferring to the teacher to trusting her own bodily experience and defending her own interpretations. The choreography remained unchanged throughout, yet her relationship with it was transformed.
The study demonstrates that expressive development can occur within existing choreographic material through embodied exploration and personal meaning-making, and highlights the teacher‘s role as a designer of learning experiences.
The findings also suggest that expressive development is inseparable from the emergence of learner agency.
Imogen, research participant for MA thesis project, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, 2026.
Still from an interdisciplinary performance project, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, 2025.
Professional practice
Chng Xin Xuan
Paul Wong
Julian Low
Jerry Teo
Simon Pike
Michelle Zhang
