The Yilan City Government yesterday dedicated March 24 to the memory of Lo Man-fei, a dancer and choreographer from Yilan County who passed away 13 years ago.

Presiding over a ceremony at the Lo Man-fei Memorial Park, Yilan Mayor Chiang Tsung-yuan said that the city would organize a professional dance competition to mark the day.

“Lo was the shining star of the Lanyang Plain,” Chiang said.

The competition is to help development dancing as a performance art and preserve Lo’s legacy, he said.

Born in 1955, Lo gained international renown and won awards from the Wu San-lien Foundation and the National Culture and Arts Foundation.

Having studied dance from childhood, Lo entered National University of Taiwan as a student of foreign languages and literature, where she studied modern dance with Liu Feng-shueh.

In her sophomore year, Lo became involved with Lin Hwai-min’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, becoming one of its lead dancers by 1979. Afterward, she studied dance at New York University and graduated with a master of fine arts degree in 1985.

Lo became a professor at Taipei National University of the Arts and later headed its dance program, where she mentored a generation of dancers for 20 years.

In 1994, she founded the Taipei Crossover Dance Theater with founding members of Cloud Gate while choreographing and performing in productions that gained international acclaim.

In 1999, Cloud Gate named Lo its artistic director and she led the group to tour campuses and communities in Taiwan, while producing Springtime in the Hospital, Love and other plays.

After her passing, Lo’s friends and family established the Lo Man-fei Scholarship to support education for talented dancers.