William Lu’s Still emerges from a crisis of disconnection, not in the world, but within dance itself. He found himself drifting away from performances that felt sealed off from life, too abstract to touch, too committed to “high art” to make room for the people watching. Authenticity arrived for him as a question: What if dance returned to its simplest purpose, revealing how humans reach for one another?
Still takes shape from that question. Built on minimal gestures rather than virtuosity, the piece studies the smallest units of connection: the moment a relationship forms, the moment it fractures, and the ghost-space that remains when someone leaves but is not entirely gone. Lu draws from Doug Varone’s philosophy that a single gesture can carry an entire emotional world, but he filters it through his own restraint, paring away everything literal so the audience can feel what is left unsaid.
The choreography is intentionally unstable: neither symbolic nor narrative, neither fully abstract nor fully representational. Lu leaves it open, almost empty, so each viewer’s own longing fills the silence. This is where the authenticity of his work becomes unmistakable. Rather than performing emotion, he creates a structure that invites the audience’s own emotional architecture to surface.
Still is a study in the physics of intimacy, how presence creates reality, how absence distorts it, and how longing becomes a place two people continue to share even when they stand apart. Lu offers connection not as sentiment but as disciplined sincerity: the courage to move with sincerity in a field that often rewards distance.
