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Published: 16:15, October 06, 2022 | Updated: 16:16, October 06, 2022
Matching steps
By Gennady Oreshkin
Published:16:15, October 06, 2022 Updated:16:16, October 06, 2022 By Gennady Oreshkin

Taking in the panoply of recent developments in dance in the Greater Bay Area, Gennady Oreshkin discovers a dynamic arena replete with cultural exchange.

Presented in Macao by the Guangzhou Song and Dance Theatre, MGM Awakening Lion brings high-tech production values to the traditional lion dance. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

The territory referred to as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area since 2015, has a long and proud history of dance. The Jin Dynasty (265-420) relocated to Jian kang (modern Nanjing) from Chang’an (modern Xi’an) between the third and sixth centuries. The northern Chinese culture they brought in their wake blended with the traditions of the southeastern Wu region (particularly Nanjing and Suzhou). While the southern elements were more or less retained in the lion dance, other forms like the drum dance, bell dance and seven trays dance, popular during the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220), gradually made way for forms such as Qianxi dance, whisk dance and white ramie dance. The last of these is often credited as the forerunner of the water sleeves dance that figures frequently in Chinese opera. Later, art forms like the Southern Fist (Nanquan) martial art style and traditional lion dance came to be accepted as the unwavering symbols of the culture of South China, or Lingnan. 

The spirit of embracing and adapting the dance forms of one’s neighbors continues. Today, knowledge and resource sharing between dance institutes located in the cities of the GBA is thriving. 

Presented in Macao by the Guangzhou Song and Dance Theatre, MGM Awakening Lion brings high-tech production values to the traditional lion dance. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

For more than four decades, the Hong Kong Dance Company (HKDC) has been a local guardian of Lingnan dance culture and other dance traditions originating in the Chinese mainland. Over the years, HKDC has collaborated with several artists and choreographers from the GBA.  The dance piece Shan Shui: An Ode to Nature is the fruit of exchanges between HKDC’s dance scientists and master practitioners of Chinese martial arts. Based on extensive research and incorporating elements from the Chinese martial art forms, Shan Shui premiered in 2021 as part of HKDC’s 40th anniversary program and returns to the Lyric Theatre at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts on Oct 14-16. 

Multiple Hong Kong Dance Award winner and HKDC artistic director Yang Yuntao choreographed the piece. “I wanted to explore the dynamics of bodies in dance — there’s something so inherently eastern about the bodies of the performers,” he says. “I wanted to dig more into that and eastern aesthetics.” 

Yang notes the importance of keeping traditions alive in the modern context. “In many HKDC productions, we’re adapting different legends, stories and folktales,” he says.

Shan Shui rests on three cultural pillars of the GBA: Chinese martial arts, Chinese dance and shanshui painting — landscape painting with brush and ink. The result is a production conveying the rawness of nature. In it the dancers use their bodies like brushstrokes creating a painting. 

Yang elaborates on what it took to put this ambitious piece together: “We hired wushu masters … mainly from the southern schools. We chose to teach (martial arts in) the southern ways as they resonate with Hong Kong.” 

In keeping with the spirit of exchange, the production features dancers selected from across the GBA, including graduates of the Guangdong Dance Shcool.

The Hong Kong Dance Company’s Shan Shui: An Ode to Nature fuses Chinese dance with martial arts. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

A new era

In December last year, an important event celebrating Lingnan culture premiered at the MGM Theater in Macao. Presented by the Guangzhou Song and Dance Theatre, MGM Awakening Lion marries cutting-edge technology with lion dance. The stepping styles are borrowed from tribal dances of southern China or Nanquan. The lion is a symbol of Chinese culture as well as strength and stability. The use of state-of-the-art LED panels resonated with the younger section of the audience, making the idea more fun than usual.  

MGM Awakening Lion presents a new challenge to the production team. It also marks a breakthrough of cultural togetherness in the GBA,” notes Shi Qianjin, the production’s artistic and chief director. “With Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao sharing the same cultural roots, this show has a special significance in terms of deepening cultural exchanges,” he adds.

Sang Jijia, resident choreographer of the City Contemporary Dance Company. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

No discussion of dance exchange between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland can be complete without a nod to the role played by the City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC). Willy Tsao, a multiaward-winning choreographer and often referred to as the Father of Modern Dance in China, is this Hong Kong-based troupe’s founder and artistic director. In 1992, Tsao established the Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC). Over the past two decades, he’s been busy opening dozens of dance studios across the mainland, while helping to push boundaries in contemporary dance in Guangdong and Beijing.

Back in 2002, Tsao collaborated with the GMDC’s Xing Liang and Sang Jijia to produce a first-of-its-kind dance satire, 365 Ways of Doing and Undoing Orientalism. Drawing together elements of Buddhism, feng shui and martial arts, the production asks what makes a piece of art truly Oriental, as opposed to Western.

One of Tsao’s stated goals is to use contemporary art to help Hong Kong become a more “mature” city. CCDC’s most recent work, Accelerating Dimension, which premiered in September, is being seen as a means to that end. Dubbed an “interactive dance adventure”, it blends live performance, motion-capture projections and augmented reality under the guidance of young choreographer Zelia ZZ Tan. The artist’s unique background in Chinese ink painting and ballroom dance was useful in creating a landscape where visual art bleeds into Chinese modern dance via cutting-edge technology. 

Yang Yuntao, artistic director of the Hong Kong Dance Company. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Several among the CCDC choreographers have been a part of cross-cultural partnerships. Sang is one of them. In 1997, he was hailed the Star of the Century by the Guangdong government for his efforts at promoting dance education in southern China and internationally. This past September, Sang presented Pa | Ethos & Dancing Philosophy — a culmination of his seminal works Pa and Ethos, both of which received international acclaim. 

Pa | Ethos & Dance Philosophy shows the contrasts between Eastern and Western dance schools, illustrated by performances choreographed in Italy with European dancers and in Hong Kong with GBA dancers. Sang says the work explores the “collision and association between the body and the spiritual world through pure dance movements and lecture performance, making boundaries vanish”. Inspired by Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric, the work explores the push and pull between the human body and the spiritual realm. 

Interestingly, the pandemic seems to have helped forge stronger ties between dance collaborators of the GBA cities, despite travel restrictions. The credit for that goes in large part to the passion and perseverance of dance professionals at the forefront of the industry.


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