In big news for the Chinese-speaking cultural community, the world-renowned Cloud Dance Theatre’s school is celebrating its 15 birthday just as the troupe itself turns 40.

Perhaps even more exciting was the awarding of the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement to Cloud Gate founder and artistic director Lin Hwai-min in July. The award is one of the highest honors available to modern dance choreographers, and its previous recipients have included luminaries such as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Paul Taylor.

Cloud Gate’s dance school has been helping children unleash their senses and get in tune with their bodies for the last 15 years.

Having enjoyed a summer’s rest, the Cloud Gate dance school welcomed the start of the fall term of its “life rhythm” program in August.

In today’s parent–child rhythm class, a young father has just finished playing a game with his three-year-old that involves them pushing against each other’s feet. He says that his son has a strong personality and always wants to win, but that these in-class physical contests between parent and child are teaching his son to accept losses and deal with frustration.

In another classroom, a few fifth and sixth graders who a few months ago experienced the expansiveness of Western-style dance in Cloud Gate’s world dance class are now studying the more contained and composed postures and movements of Asian dance.

Lin had been thinking about establishing a school from the time he first founded Cloud Gate. He finally began the process in 1995 by creating a curriculum development committee.

The committee included 30-some experts in childhood education, psychology, the arts, and dance, as well as mental, physical and spiritual development. They ultimately spent three years on the project, debating and revising each draft of the curriculum innumerable times along the way.

Kate Wen, the school’s director, says that the life rhythm curriculum is all about “body movement” and stresses that all of its lesson plans are “organic.” The school makes minor revisions to the curriculum ­every three years, and gives it a major overhaul ­every five, a process that has, over the last 15 years, led to its present course of study.

The curriculum varies with the age of the student. In the case of students in the three-to-four-year-old range, at least one parent is required to attend class and work on parent-child interactions with them. Students in the 18–59-year-old range study adult rhythm. Those over the age of 60 study mature rhythm.

Referencing the process by which a tadpole becomes a frog, Lin has said, “For everyone at every stage of their life, growing requires losing a piece of your tail.” The quote hangs by the entrance to Cloud Gate’s school to make the point that we must become more courageous and confident with life’s every transformation if we are to face and overcome the challenges of each new stage of being.

When all is said and done, Cloud Gate’s dance school doesn’t teach dance. Instead, it focuses on the wellsprings of dance, seeking to reintroduce students to their bodies and help them discover the natural rhythms present in their experience of life.

Lin explains, “Our bodies are our greatest gift in life, but we’re generally oblivious to them until we get sick or injured. Cloud Gate established its school to address this need [to be more aware of our bodies].”

Lin has laid down “three nos” for the rhythm courses for children: no stretching, no back bends, and no dance techniques.

This makes some parents wonder what kids actually learn.

Lin’s response is that the school creates scenarios that encourage students to develop their own movements.

Put another way, the school doesn’t impose a particular solution to the question of rhythm; it believes there are any number of “right” answers. Students have different understandings of the scenarios, and come up with different solutions. At Cloud Gate, difference is encouraged.

“An eagle can fly this way. What other ways can it fly?” “In addition to opening up your hands, can you find another way to show a flower blossoming?” “How can two people working together make a bridge with their bodies?” Teachers often present their students with prompts such as these, then encourage them to express their various ideas through the movement of their limbs.

Movements like these that originate in our life experience may not be exactly “dance,” but are certainly the physical and mental precursors to dance.

­Chang ­Chung-­shiuan, vice president of National Tai­pei University of the Arts, helped Cloud Gate with its curriculum planning. She says that because dance is one of the arts, dancers have to learn to integrate all of their sensory input before they can begin to learn dance skills. In other words, the “life rhythm” taught by the school is the basis of dance as an art.

What’s the point of the scenarios? Chang says that children’s lives are often rigidly constrained, and in recent years these constraints have grown beyond televisions and computers to include game consoles, cellphones, and tablet computers. “Children,” she explains, “have no time for their bodies.”

Lin is more concerned that standardized education “boxes children in and destroys their innate capabilities.”

Once, when attending an awards ceremony for a middle-school mathematics competition, Chang was stunned to note how unbalanced and stooped the award-winning children’s bodies were. “It was obvious that they hadn’t given their bodies nearly as much thought as their minds.”

Cloud Gate’s dancers view the body as a medium through which they can express themselves. The troupe’s school adheres to the same principle.

At the August press conference announcing Cloud Gate’s 40th anniversary production, Rice, Lin described the new piece’s creative orientation using the elements earth, sun, wind, pollen, grain, water and fire.

Earlier Cloud Gate pieces touching on rice, from the abstract rice-plant movements of the dancers in Legacy to the golden rice pouring down on the dancer in Songs of the Wanderers, grew out of their creator and their dancers’ understanding and interpretation of life. The new piece does as well.

Cloud Gate has turned 40 with all the vigor of an institution still in its prime. Its 15-year-old school, which now has 19 branches and 12,000 students, is a rapidly growing teen. And its founder, 66-year-old Lin Hwai-min, is a man still committed to the dream of his youth: teaching the people of Taiwan to move comfortably to the rhythms of their lives and helping them shape their own dances with confidence.