Tao Ye has been titling his pieces by number—2, 3, 4, all the way to this month’s 18—since he and a couple of friends formed Tao Dance Theater in 2008, in Beijing. The numbers may obscure how distinct each ancient-seeming body-drama feels, but they do suggest that the dances belong to a single system. And, astoundingly, they do. Ye has invented not a style—distinctive enough—but a language, a rare achievement. His root idea is the circle. “Imagine every part of your body is a point that can draw circles,” he told the Web site Seeing Dance. “Every joint, limb, even every hair.” The effect is not wholesome placidity, as one might expect from something as round and pleasing as a circle, but tumult: a roomful of dancers setting themselves against the body’s inertia. In starchy, voluminous robes, they dig into the floor, whip their heads and hips in ferocious figures, and stop dead. Though the choreography is rigorously patterned, the rhythms of phrases vary enough to constantly catch you off guard. For July, the Athens Epidaurus Festival and Barcelona’s Festival Grec host 16 and 17, while ImPulsTanz outdoes itself with Ye’s last five pieces, including its commission of 18. —Apollinaire Scherr