2024 RT Amination Banner.gif

China Daily

Focus> Culture HK> Content
Friday, April 23, 2021, 10:43
40 years of matching steps
By Li Meng
Friday, April 23, 2021, 10:43 By Li Meng

The Hong Kong Dance Company never stopped innovating and exploring new opportunities for collaboration and cross-disciplinary work even at the height of the pandemic-triggered restrictions. Li Meng tries to gauge what makes the time-tested institution tick.

Li Han plays the male lead in the Hong Kong Dance Company production L’Amour Immortel. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Over the last 10 years, on most weekday mornings, Li Han has taken a tram to Sheung Wan Municipal Services Building. 

“It seems like a ritual,” said Li, who is a principal dancer with the Hong Kong Dance Company, and like several of his colleagues, considers his day incomplete without a visit to the company’s studio on the building’s eighth floor. 

One of the city’s nine publicly funded premier performing-arts companies, the HKDC is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, with 17 months of diverse programs and events. The lineup includes grand dance dramas, exhibitions, educational dance performances, as well as a dance fair targeted specifically at young people. 

“We would love to share with our audience how HKDC inherits the traditions as well as embraces innovations,” Executive Director David Tsui said. 

The Hong Kong Dance Company’s Children’s and Youth troupes present Fun Ride with Big Beard — Dancing Poems. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

A platform for the finest

HKDC was established in 1981 with the aim of promoting Chinese dance as seen through the lens of a contemporary artistic vision and with Hong Kong characteristics. Over the last 40 years, HKDC has staged over 200 productions, featuring dancers and performance artistes from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. 

The company’s early members include Hong Kong-born Mui Cheuk-yin and the Malaysian artist Ong Yong Lock, who joined in 1981 and 1989 respectively, and are now counted among the city’s best-known dancer-choreographers. Mui was HKDC’s principal dancer from 1981 to 1990 and then attached to the company as an independent choreographer from 1991 onward. Her latest work for HKDC — The Last Dance, based on the preeminent Taiwan writer Pai Hsien-yung’s short story The Last Night of Madam Chin — would have been staged in 2020 if it not for the pandemic. 

HKDC was registered as a charity supported by the local government in 2001. The following year, Yang Yuntao, who hails from Yunnan province, left the Beijing Modern Dance Company to join HKDC as a principal dancer. In 2013, the then-38-year-old Yang succeeded choreographer Leung Kwok-shing to become HKDC’s youngest-ever artistic director. 

Although he has been living in Hong Kong for nearly 20 years, Yang’s curiosity about the city is insatiable. Together with his colleagues, Yang is forever trying to rethink and reimagine ways of incorporating elements of Hong Kong’s pop and commercial culture into new productions. 

“Hong Kong and its culture has always been an inspiration to me,” Yang said. His fascination with Hong Kong movies, pop songs and Cantonese opera is evident in productions such as L’Amour Immortel, Storm Clouds, and Waiting Heart.  

Choreographed by Yang Yuntao, Storm Clouds is based on a popular martial arts comic series by Ma Wing-shing. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

For instance, L’Amour Immortel, staged in 2015, is inspired by Pu Songling’s 1740 short story collection, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, which was also the basis of Tsui Hark’s 1987 film, A Chinese Ghost Story

The tale of a human being falling in love with a ghost, both adapted for the stage and directed by Yang, combined both elements of literature and film. The result was a grand dance drama full of emotions, imagination and poetic expressions. 

Even as he was putting the show together, Yang was confident about its success. 

“The classic Chinese tale, Tsui Hark’s popular movie as well as the enduring theme of love and freedom — all of these went into shaping our collective memories and can be shared with viewers from different cultural backgrounds,” said Yang. True to expectations, the dance drama went on to receive a number of awards, and has traveled to Beijing, Guangzhou , Shanghai, Hangzhou and Taipei over the past six years.

Principal Dancer Li counts playing the main role of Ning Caichen in L’Amour Immortel as one of the most unforgettable experiences of his life. Besides following the choreographer’s instructions in perfecting his moves, Li is also deeply invested in exploring the psychological aspects of the story. The role won him the Outstanding Performance by a Male Dancer title at the 18th Hong Kong Dance Awards in 2016. The citation praised his “heartfelt portrayal” and “innate elegance.” 

Rehearsals for The Moon Opera, choreographed by Wang Yabin and staged earlier this year, were conducted online via Zoom. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Let imagination soar

HKDC dancers are encouraged to try their hand at choreography as well as mentoring younger dancers. For example, Wu Kam-ming, who was a dancer with the company for 18 years, moved on to tutoring HKDC’s young dancers. Li and senior dancer Chen Rong say they cherish being given a chance to present their works as choreographers. 

“Thanks to HKDC and its artistic director, Yang Yuntao, we dancers have a chance to produce our own works and express our own ideas.” Li said. 

Both Yang and Tsui are interested in exploring the interface between dance traditions and contemporary art. HKDC has frequently invited artists, writers and musicians to collaborate on new projects. Choreographers of classical ballet and contemporary dance are often engaged in artistic dialogues with HKDC dancers. 

Wang Yabin, the award-winning choreographer who worked with HKDC dancers to create the dance drama The Moon Opera, staged in February, said she was impressed by the professionalism of the ensemble and its openness to fresh ideas. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wang and HKDC dancers held rehearsals and discussions via Zoom. This seemed like a major hassle when they began, but after a while, everyone involved started warming up to the advantages of online collaborations.

From left: Hong Kong Dance Company Artistic Director Yang Yuntao, dancer-tutor Wu Kam-ming, Executive Director David Tsui, and principal dancer Li Han. (RAYMOND CHAN / CHINA DAILY)

Like elsewhere in the world, the cultural venues in Hong Kong were closed for months in 2020. During this time, the HKDC dancers interacted with their audiences via social media channels, and livestreamed new productions on online platforms. Convergence, an anthology of the final round of performance pieces that emerged as a result of HKDC’s three-year project exploring the inter-relationship between Chinese martial arts and dance, was presented in the form of an online show and VR video program. 

Team spirit is one of the company’s key strengths, its leaders said. 

“We will keep moving forward to meet the demands of art lovers,” said Tsui, to which Yang added that while a dancer exploring new ideas might be a solitary act, the scene changes dramatically once everyone is in the rehearsal room. 

“Working and gathering together make us feel less alone,” he said. 


Share this story

CHINA DAILY
HONG KONG NEWS
OPEN
Please click in the upper right corner to open it in your browser !