Cassie Wang
Boston, MA
RDC Season 8 Choreographer - Entry Points
The Head is Not the Star of the Body
An adapted, 20min restaging
Listen: Inspiration, Process, and the Making of The Head is Not the Star of the Body - St. Louis Dancescapes
Biography
Cassie Wang is a performer and interdisciplinary dancemaker based between Boston and New York. Cassie is a movement researcher with Partnering Lab and a principal dancer with KAIROS Dance Theater. Her other recent performance credits include work with the Boston Lyric Opera, The Slutcracker, Shura Baryshnikov, Jessi Stegall, and Ilya Vidrin. Cassie was a 2025 danceWEB Scholar at ImPulsTanz, a 2024–25 Next Steps for Boston Dance grantee, and is currently in residence at Urbanity Dance. She has also held residencies at Boston Center for the Arts and Bearnstow and been presented by Motion State Arts, Asian American Ballet Project, The Bang Group, and Resilience Dance Company. Cassie worked as a teaching assistant in Dance at Harvard University and earned a BA from Pomona College in Computer Science with minors in Dance and Media Studies.
Cassie's Artist Statement
My dancemaking lives on a spectrum between the hyperliteral and the poetic, rooted in an ongoing inquiry into how I understand myself in relation to others and the world around me. I am inspired by chance existential intimacy and believe in the inextricable intertwinement of creative process and life.
About The Head is Not the Star of the Body
Directed and choreographed by Cassie Wang, the evening-length dance production responds to a selection of songs by American indie folk band Big Thief. As a meditation on desire, Wang fuses generative video art and projection into a performance of contemporary dance that is intimate and tender through moments of affective viscerality.With the sound and lyricism of the music serving as inspiration for ethnographic inquiry and movement generation, six performers traverse through states of holding, witnessing, singing, chasing, and coalescing in embodiments of varying relationality. The audience frames the performance on opposite sides, positioned to witness both the dance and a reflection of themselves/the other. Throughout this multi-year process, Wang and her collaborators ground themselves in the questions: How does longing reveal identity? How do we sit with someone else’s longing? How do we measure the distance between subjects of longing? In process and in performance, this new work aims to cultivate mutual understanding of self and other.
Development and support The Head is not the Star of the Body was incubated through the Boston Center for the Arts Dance Lab (2023–24) and Dancemakers (2024–25) Residencies. The premiere at Mechanics' Hall is possible through a NEFA NEST Grant partnership with Boston Center for the Arts. The development of this project has been supported by The Boston Foundation’s Next Steps for Boston Dance Grant, NEFA’s New England Dance Fund, Movement Arts Creation Studio, and generous donations from my community and family members. This project was also developed with residency support from Jacob's Pillow, the Nautilus Chamber (San Miguel de Allende, MX), and MIDDAY Movement's Rough Drafts program.
