July 12, 2024

Seymour Centre

Hong Kong Dance Company

Review by Paul Neeson (Arts Wednesday)

When I read the Hong Kong Dance Company was doing a performance of modern Chinese dance combined with martial arts at the Seymour Centre, visions were conjured of high-energy dance, some acrobatics and lots of colour (predominately red). But it shows how wrong one’s assumptions can be. Convergence was instead a monochromatic, bleak dystopian narrative that explored a narrative between, according to the Artistic Director, “tranquility and exuberance, stillness and motion.” 

This innovative dance company was founded in 1981 (pre-reunification) and has toured extensively garnering many international awards along the way. They spent the last four years studying traditional Chinese martial arts, including Hung Kuen, Choy Lay Fut, and Fujian White Crane. Artistic Director, Yang Yuntao says the extended study period aimed to incorporate  the flow of qi (energy) into the dancers’ bodies connecting ancient tradition with the contemporary.

The work opened with a low electronic hum and a dark stage with the almost motionless dancers slowly coming to life as it were. The costumes were sombre variations of black, grey and white, the rear projection in similar monochromatic perhaps even drab tones. Then they began to march across the stage in a constant rhythm provided only by their footsteps, like an endless stream of mindless automatons. A constant pulse infused the music and the projection was like a roiling underwater cauldron.

Over what seemed a prolonged period  of time, the dancers one by one became animated and burst into exuberant martial arts poses and movements, only to be subsumed by stillness once again. This constant battle ebbed and flowed until eventually there was motion across the stage and beyond, the individual dancers then started to combine with steps that required ever increasing numbers to make their physical presence more real and present – somehow more concrete.

At this point a soft amber light, like a distant wan sun, began to creep into the lighting design (Garbriel Fung Kwok-kee). The energy flowed more vigorously until at the zenith of the work, body-mountains, or mountains of bodies in typical pyramid formation, began to form with dancers trying to scale the heights and reach the distant warm glow. Eventually they realised it was impossible and looked up yearningly as the sun began to set.

The troupe was very skilful especially keeping a tempo where there was little that was obvious in the musical score (Paul Yip), it was largely a moody atmospheric electronic soundscape with  a rhythm and pulse that while dramatic was by the same token muted, almost diffuse. Two dancers  in particular stood out from the ensemble. Principal dancer Hua Chi-yu expressed such elegant beauty in arms the like of which all dancers must have, vulnerable at times, even fragile but always in control, this almost liquid flow contrasted with the staccato of the brutal martial arts movements going on around her. She created shapes that seemed to linger in the air long after the body had moved on. If beauty was her realm, then strength was best portrayed by Ong Zhe Shen, who could dominate the stage like a rock in a stream.

There were many contrasts in Convergence that struggled for dominance throughout the work. In the end the stage returned to grey, the motion became automated once again and ultimately returned to stasis and quiet.

It is tempting to superimpose one’s own ideology onto a cultural artefact, not fully understanding the subtleties and nuances. To me Convergence was more about compliance, and the authoritarian insistence of the CCP on conforming to the new reality in Hong Kong. I can never know if that was the hidden message in the work, and that the creative team was being discreetly subversive, not unlike Shostakovich under Stalin’s regime. Interestingly Shostakovich also received awards from the state.

Either way, as a contemporary dance work Convergence was provocative, stimulating and entertaining. It took three curtain calls for the dour, serious looks on the dancers’ faces to thaw and a glimmer of a smile to appear at the corners of their mouths. That in itself was a fitting reward to the audience that had, like the performers, stoically maintained an unyielding sombre tone for over an hour. Bravo!