"She has kept that integrity," Stoeckley said. "We all want to be like that."
"She's really fun to work with ... she can laugh and work very hard, be very fierce and serious at the same time," said Jennifer de Palo-Rivera, soloist with the company.
Fierceness is a quality needed for many of the roles that Graham created, craziness would seem to be another. But Sheu said it is all about control.
"The crazier the role, the more calm you should be," Sheu said, using the role of Medea (in Cave of the Heart) as an example. "You can control your emotions, control the audience's emotions, so you can take them with you. You can't just go crazy, go wild."
Control is also crucial if you are trying to balance life as a dancer in New York and on the road with commitments here in Taiwan.
Sheu's family is here and she has maintained her ties with the Taiwanese dance scene. She danced as a soloist with the Cloud Gate Dance Theater in 1998, 2000 and 2001 and then as a guest artist with Cloud Gate 2 last spring. In 2002 she formed the LA/FA Dance Theater with choreographer Bulareyaung Pagarlava, another Cloud Gate alumnus who is also her boyfriend.
But a life split between a career in New York and family and friends in Taiwan has not been easy.
"We live in the same neighborhood in New York. So we often take the same [subway] train home after work," said fellow dancer, French-born Virginie Mecene. "One day I asked her what she was going to do on the weekend and she said she was just going to stay home and sleep ... there wasn't anything else. She misses her family and home in Taiwan so much that she can't make her home in New York."
Sheu admitted as much when asked how she felt about coming back to Taiwan with the company.
"It's one of my dreams -- that my dancing and my life can be in the same place," she said. "Maybe only for a few days my dream can come true."
When asked what she saw herself doing in the future, she said that what she wanted was to to pass on her skills. But she also said there are more roles in the Graham repertoire that she wanted to try, including Night Journey and Clytemnestra.
"I'm not ready to stop learning yet," she said.
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