Meet Teake Zu | Movement Artist and Guide

We had the good fortune of connecting with Teake Zu and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Teake, career-wise, where do you want to be in the end?
I don’t think of careers as having an end. I would hope I am always engaged in the same thing, on any given day at any point in my life. Waking up with the tools and resources at my disposal to create and explore this art, a semi-steady outlet to express and display those creations, a forum in which to share and interact with a community of others whose work I can mutually inspire and be inspired by, and a vital, sustainable feedback loop to keep the process going relatively robustly from one day to the next. I feel I experience that now. And I hope to experience it more and more and in larger degrees over time. So more than anything it’s a question of scale. What I want for myself professionally in the future is the same as what I am experiencing now, and I would love to see the scale of it shift and blossom and maybe even balloon. But how big is too big, I can’t say now. I’m excited to ride the waves. The goal is already here.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
My practice is rooted in worldviews and disciplines emergent from the Far East, namely the philosophies of Daoism and Zen Meditation, the health practices and body maps of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and the movement pathways of various forms of martial arts and qigong therapies, primarily influenced by the Wudang schools of Hubei China. This is a result of my having studied under an instructor who relocated from Hangzhou, China to Connecticut, where I grew up and studied under her from the age of 10.

Since that time however, although I still stay true to the roots of that practice in the way I train and condition myself, I have incorporated various other worldviews and philosophies that I find to be very compatible and complimentary to the foundation established by my teacher. My interest has drawn me toward in-depth study of a variety of different earth-based practices and lifeways. Primarily I explore those hailing from Apachería in the U.S. Southwest through means of an immersive wilderness program I have attended for many summers. My views and teachings are also influenced by distinctly Toltec methods and practices emerging from throughout Mesoamerica, which I began to explore while an anthropology major at Harvard University. Most recently I have studied and began to incorporate the teachings of the South African Zulu knowledge keepers, the Sangoma, as introduced to me in the writings and speeches of the late Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa and subsequently through a visit to Johannesburg during my time at an artist residency there briefly at the start of 2020 (just prior to lockdowns).

I incorporate a variety of worldviews into my art and my movement/meditation instruction. I do my best to distill these teachings down to the essentials so that they are readily transferable and digestible by students from a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels. But I also make certain that I have a firm understanding of and reverence for a teaching before I ever deign to transmit it, and only ever in a form deemed acceptable and appropriate by the source from which I received it.

For this reason, my training trajectory and cultivation of a working curriculum has been very very slow and steady indeed. The difficulty this presents is that I have had to resist any urge towards being hasty in my attempts to spread what I have taken years to gather and cultivate (and continue to do so in an ongoing process). And it is only now, after years of touch and go efforts that I can look back and recognize that a considerable momentum has started to build in terms of developing a now relatively consistent base of committed and dedicated students and co-creators. I am grateful for the quality and intentionality behind each of these connections. And I wouldn’t rush this process or have it any other way.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Botanical gardens. Huntington is expansive and worth getting lost in.

Getty Villa Museum for old art

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for new art

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My teacher, Wushu & Taichi instructor, “Laoshi”, and mentor: Grandmaster Cheng Aiping from Hangzhou China. She is the person who taught me all I know for the first decade of my movement journey, starting from the time I was 10. I am grateful to still be in touch with her to this day, and I always hope that the work and I do in spreading these movements and life and health pathways can do her justice and make her proud. Since that time there are countless other individuals and communities that I have been privileged to walk through and learn from and grow in as I expand and explore deeper into my art and my work. But those first years under the focused and dedicated tutelage of my Laoshi are the foundation and framework from which all other exploration takes root.

Website: https://www.zuzuology.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zuzusauvage/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TeakeMovements

Other: https://vimeo.com/zuzusauvage

Image Credits
Lee Gumbs (black and red images) ; Colin Sussingham (long exposure and red katana) ; Snakebite Cortez (jeans and black tank top) ; Alice Temple (black and white two swords) ; Max Hardman (One leg balance Camo jacket) ; Sophie Kietzmann (Jeans and black/gold vest)