Step Dance is a solo work developed from a fifteen-day journey back to the Bunun ancestral homeland. Rather than portraying cultural heritage, the work investigates Indigenous awakening as an embodied process. It questions the gap between being identified as Indigenous and living Indigenous knowledge through the body. Transforming the traditional Bunun stepping movement into a contemporary choreographic language, the work unfolds through repetitive motion, shifting weight, and rhythmic breath, allowing the body to carry memory, rupture, and ancestral presence. Instead of searching for home, Step Dance asks how Indigenous identity can be reawakened beyond cultural representation and fixed definitions. The body becomes a living archive where land, history, and identity are continuously negotiated, proposing Indigenous identity not as a static label, but as an ongoing cultural practice that is constantly embodied, renewed, and reimagined.
