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After 18 years of cultivating dance in South Philadelphia, Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers will take its final bow on March 27 and 28 at Drexel University’s Mandell Theater, presenting a concert of world premieres and audience favorites.

The closure of the company and its home on Percy Street, the CHI Movement Center around the corner from Philly cheesesteak landmarks Pat’s King of Steaks and Geno’s Steaks, could send ripples across Philadelphia’s dance community.

“It feels like a loss for the community, and it feels like another shift in our post-COVID world,” said Mikaela Boone, programming director and artistic producer for FringeArts. “I think it will be a felt shift in terms of the dance ecosystem in Philly.”

Winding down the company with fire

Kun-Yang Lin founded the company to create modern choreography rooted in Asian dance traditions. He grew up in Hsinchu, Taiwan, turned down a job offer from the world-renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theater in 1992, and moved to New York City to start his own company. He got a teaching job at Temple University and relocated to Philadelphia in 2008.

“Personally, I don’t drive. When I grew up only rich people could drive,” Lin said. “So I need a walkable city. Philadelphia was the perfect choice.”

For his company’s final performance, Lin created “Fire Ritual Dance/Fenghuang in Us,” which includes a traditional Confucian ritual dance involving long pheasant plumes.

“It was the first dance I saw in Taiwan,” he said. “But that ritual dance is very quiet, very graceful, very elegant. Of course, I apply that into a contemporary sensibility. I want to bring the fire out.”

Lin often refers to himself as living in the “in-between.” His father was Catholic and spoke Mandarin. His mother is Buddhist and speaks Taiwanese. Linn’s upbringing set him up to carve out a space in the dance world where he slides between traditions.

“Fire Ritual Dance/Fenghuang in Us” is also inspired by the Persian poet Rumi and the American President Abraham Lincoln. Rumi wrote that “whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream. If you are a friend of the Divine, fire is your water.” Lincoln promised warring entities will be unified once they are touched “by the better angels of our nature.”

“When the country is so divided, we need that peaceful angel, the angel in our true nature,” Lin said. “That’s how dance is a way I connect with myself, with society and with the world.”

What Philly’s dance community will miss

Lin’s company is not just a performance troupe, but has become an institution. The CHI Movement Arts Center is a nonprofit providing education and curatorial programs.

The building also rents out studio space to smaller dance companies at a low cost. The company’s Inhale Performance Series selects emerging and accomplished dancers to present new and old work in front of an audience and receive feedback.

“CHI Arts is probably alone in its class,” said Terry Fox, director of Philadelphia Dance Projects, in an email. “Kun-Yang Lin knows the importance of trying new ideas before an audience, and the Inhale series supported many local artists in that regard.”

Ben Grinberg, co-founder of the Cannonball Festival, said the CHI Movement Arts Center was more than a rental facility. It brought artists together to share work.

“Inhale and some of the other community series that they curated for so many years were so impactful for so many people,” he said. “I met so many different folks whose work I might not have ever been exposed to just by going to see Inhale.”

One of the impetuses for Grinberg to form Cannonball in 2021 was the erosion of spaces for experimental dance in Philadelphia. He said the CHI Movement Arts Center set the high bar for affordable, clean and conveniently located spaces with good floors.

“It has such a great floor,” Grinberg said. “So many people in the dance community were so excited about the floor there. There are so many dance spaces in Philly that are really reclaimed urban ruins, basically, factories and things like that. You kind of get the floor you get.”

The CHI Movement Arts Center is not the only dance space in Philadelphia accessible to performers with relatively small budgets. Other spaces include Cardell Dance Studio in Fairmount, fidget space in Fishtown, Studio 34 in West Philadelphia, the Community Education Center in Powelton Village, Philly PACK in South Philadelphia and the Maas building in Kensington.

The CHI Movement Arts Center will be sold

The future of the Percy Street building is still pending. Lin said he must sell it. He and his husband, Ken Metzner, who worked in corporate law, have always subsidized the company with money from their salaried day jobs. Now that they are both retiring, their life savings are tied up in the value of the building.

Lin and the company’s executive director, Katie Moore-Derkits, are trying to sell the building to another arts organization, hoping it will continue to serve as a dance space.

“We’ve really tried to listen to the needs of our community and establish outreach programs, education programs and other ways to engage communities that might not normally interact with dance,” Moore-Derkits said. “Kun-Yang really sees dance as the integration of body, spirit and mind. It’s a philosophy. Dance is our way of being in the world.”

While the dance company’s performance troupe will come to an end, Moore-Derkits said the fate of the larger company is still to be determined. She held out the possibility that the nonprofit’s programs may continue.

But there are many challenges to consider.

“The arts and culture ecosystem in Philadelphia is a difficult environment in which to create and sustain the professional ensemble as we’ve currently had it, which is eight to 10 dance artists per season on an eight- to 10-month-long contract,” she said. “That year-round model for a contemporary dance company has become harder and harder to sustain.”

Dance has been slow to recover from the COVID shutdown

Moore-Derkits said the uncertainty of the National Endowment for the Arts, which had consistently supported the dance company until the widespread cancellations last year, has made the future precarious. She also said that the general political climate appears to be hostile to gay, immigrant artists such as Kun-Yang Lin.

Piling on the problems, audiences for dance have not come back to prepandemic levels.

While other performance art forms such as theater and music have more or less recovered since the COVID-19 shutdowns, dance continues to struggle.

Even in the Philly Fringe, which has been a bright spot in postpandemic recovery, seeing record numbers of performers and audiences for theater last year, dance has been slow to return to prepandemic levels.

“We saw a step up again this year, but there’s a different audience feeling around it,” said Boone at FringeArts. “What dance does is it gets people together in a room, especially with classes and workshops. It’s one of these opportunities to lean into the practice of human touch, which is something that we lost a little bit. People don’t interact with each other physically in the same way.”

Lin’s “Fire Ritual Dance/Fenghuang in Us” was intentionally created to end his company on a hopeful note, he said. The Fenghuang is a mythological bird in Asian traditions, similar to a phoenix, which rises from ashes when a peaceful harmony is achieved.

“We need a ritual,” Lin said. “That’s why closing the company for me is not a farewell. It’s a ritual. The ritual hopefully can spark the fire in each of us.”

“Echo and Flame / Fenghuang Awakens” will feature five works by Kun-Yang Lin, including the world premiere of “Fire Ritual Dance / Fenghuang in Us” and a rare opportunity to see Lin himself performing, which he has not done in over a decade, in his 2021 piece “17 Move / In Memory of Gus.”

The dance concert will be performed three times over two days, March 27 and 28, at Drexel University’s Mandell Theater.