In 1988, dancer-choreographer Ku Ming-shen, then a teacher at the Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, visited the University of Illinois in the United States. There, one evening, she and a group of students broke into a dance that continued well into the night. Ku describes the experience as magical and says she just could not stop dancing.

"There was a strong energy among the dancers that influenced me," recalls Ku. "My moves happened in reaction to other dancers."

Later, Ku found out that the dance was called contact improvisation, a form of modern dance, which is usually performed by two or more people, exploring the physics of shared weight through contact, such as pushing, lifting and rolling off one another.