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The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) is very pleased to announce ON VIEW: HONG KONG, as the latest dance collaboration with Sue Healey, a multi-award-winning Australian choreographer and screendance director. The collaboration is the first dance production by WKCDA, under which Healey, Hong Kong cinematographer Maurice Lai and 10 Hong Kong dance artists have been commissioned to create a series of distinctive moving images of dance. These images will be developed into online videos, an installation exhibition and live performances which will showcase the broad and diverse potential for development between dance and moving image.
As various performing arts venues are to be completed soon within the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD), how to break through the existing framework for dance projects, and provide a new perspective and way of experiencing the art form of dance has become an important consideration for WKCDA. In addition to the provision of hardware, the nurturing of talent has become key. This project has offered artists a professional platform to further improve their practice, granting them an exclusive opportunity to perform on a global stage, leading to the creation of ON VIEW: HONG KONG.
Healey in her work has been investigating the act of ‘seeing’ and ‘being seen’: two concepts that are the focus of her ON VIEW: HONG KONG series. She asks the questions: What kind of presentation is the best to show audience the diversity of Hong Kong dance artists? And how their presence, gaze, gestures movement, dance style, strength and rhythm are being seen?
The series re-examines the definition and connotation of portraiture, identity and the moving body, putting the art form of dance on camera and redefining it.
Through ON VIEW: HONG KONG, the Authority hopes to open up the thinking and imagination of producers, performers and audience on dance and moving image, and promote the long-term development of the two media by combining their distinctive qualities.
The 10 dance artists taking part in Healey’s series are between 25 to 58 years old, from different backgrounds and experiences, presenting the audience with the breadth of diversity of dance artists in Hong Kong. They are (in alphabetical order): Abby Chan, Hugh Cho, Yuh Egami (Hong Kong Ballet), Joseph Lee, Jennifer Mok, Mui Cheuk Yin, Qiao Yang (City Contemporary Dance Company), Ivy Tsui, Yang Yun-tao (Hong Kong Dance Company) and Daniel Yeung.
The series consists of several parts, including ‘triptych’, ‘environment’ and ‘animals’. For ‘environment’, filming has taken place in various locations in Hong Kong, including Lion Rock, public estates, commercial districts, universities and rural areas, showcasing the the various and vibrant looks of the city, and capturing the unique dynamics of the artists in relation to the physical space. In ‘animal’, each dancer selects an animal to dance with, be it dancing with a live animal in the studio, or bringing a symbolic sign of the animal into the camera’s view, which includes snake, cow, peacock, iguana, cat and dog.
Louis Yu, Executive Director, Performing Arts, WKCDA said: “A renowned independent choreographer and filmmaker, Sue Healey is known for her distinctive works for which she has received numerous awards. Through ON VIEW: HONG KONG, we hope to deepen the audience’s understanding of the diversified development of dance in Hong Kong. At the same time, we understand that the exchange of talent is paramount to the development of the arts, which is part of our development strategy. Following this collaboration with 10 Hong Kong dancers, the Authority is in the process of discussing with other countries and regions including Taiwan and Japan, to create an Asian edition of ON VIEW, with an aim to promote cross-region collaboration in Asia.”
Anna CY Chan, Head of Dance, Performing Arts, WKCDA, said: “Screendance has been developing in Hong Kong with a solid foundation over the past 10 years. Different organisations and platforms have been promoting the training and showcasing of the art form. As the performing arts venues within WKCD are completed in the future, how to widen the experience of the audience in dance has become a major consideration. With the advanced development of technology, computers and mobile phones have already become a part of our daily lives. With the growing impact of technology in the future, moving images will become a major direction for us to reach out to more audience in dance to widen their horizons.”
ON VIEW: HONG KONG will be presented through various platforms and formats. Online videos will be available, while the installation exhibition will be presented at Freespace at Taikoo Place on 1 to 3 November, a programme co-organised by WKCDA and Swire Properties. Two live performances will be held on the evenings of 2 and 3 November. A publication recording the entire creation process and featuring interviews with Sue Healey, Maurice Lai, Anna CY Chan and the participating artists, in addition to essays on the art form of screendance will be on sale during the exhibition period.
General Information
Exhibition Period:
1 – 3 November 2017
9am – 6pm
Live performance:
2 and 3 November 2017
8pm
Location:
ArtisTree, Taikoo Place, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong
For further information, visit the website https://www.westkowloon.hk/en/tkponview.
Remarks
About West Kowloon Cultural District
Located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest cultural projects in the world. The vision of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong. With a complex of theatres, performance spaces and M+, West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances and cultural events, as well as provide 23 hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.
Annex
ON VIEW: HONG KONG Production Team
Filmmaker and choreographer
Sue Healey
Sue Healey is a choreographer and filmmaker, and one of Australia’s foremost independent dance-makers. Experimenting with form and perception, Healey creates dance for diverse spaces and contexts: theatres, galleries and the camera. Her work has toured to Asia, USA, UK and throughout Australia and New Zealand.
Healey received a Creative Fellowship in 2014 from the Australia Council for Arts, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne 2015.
Her films are widely acclaimed and have screened in many major international festivals and have won awards including; 5 Australian Dance Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Dance on Film/New Media and Independent Dance, winner Reeldance Australia and winner IL Coreografo Elettronico, Napolidanza, Italy. She has created 10 major films with cinematographer Judd Overton, her key film collaborator. Her 2017 films include En Route for the new Wynscreen public art project at Wynyard train station, Sydney and City as Portrait Gallery exhibited the at the Customshouse, Sydney. Sue choreographed The Seasons Retouched for the New Zealand Dance Company ‘Kiss the Sky’ season in June 2017 with the Blackbird Ensemble.
Sue is currently creating the Asia version of ON VIEW, a major performance installation that collaborate with different cities, produced by West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in Hong Kong, 2017-2019.
Cinematographer
Maurice Lai
Since 2000, Maurice Lai has produced dance and performance videos and promotional films for various performing arts organisations in Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Italy, the USA and the UK. His first independent dance video A Cup of Tea, a collaboration with Yuri Ng, was the award-winning video at the Jumping Frames Dance Video Competition 2004 in Hong Kong, and received a special mention at IL Coreografo Elettronico and the XIV Festival Internazionale Di Videodanza 2006 in Napoli, Italy. In 2011 and 2012, Jumping Frames screened five of his dance videos in Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, Rome, Florence and Napoli. In 2013 and 2014, Maurice was a resident artist at Experimental Film Virginia at the Harbour for the Arts Festival in USA. In 2015, he received the Hong Kong Dance Award for Outstanding Achievement in Video and Photography for Dance from the Hong Kong Dance Alliance. In 2017, he received the City Contemporary Dance Laureate from City Contemporary Dance Company.
Performers-Hong Kong Artists
Abby Chan
Abby Chan is a graduate of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, and was a dancer and guest choreographer with the Hong Kong City Contemporary Dance Company from 1991 to 1998. The founder of Chan-Can-Dance Theatre and co-artistic director of Mcmuimui Dansemble, she received the Lee Hysan Foundation Fellowship of the Asian Cultural Council to present her work in New York. In New York her work has been presented at various theatres and festivals including the Mulberry Street Theatre, Joyce SoHo, the chashama OASIS Festival, the Brooklyn Arts Exchange Women’s Performance Festival, 92nd Street Y, Galapagos Art Space, Chen Dance Center and La MaMa.
Chan’s choreography has been performed in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Taipei, Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, Kyoto, Malaysia, Sydney, Sao Paulo, Colorado and New York, and she is a four-time recipient of the Hong Kong Dance Award.
In addition to her dance work, Chan has collaborated and performed with a number of theatre companies, showcasing her versatility in performing arts. Recent appearances include Candace Chong’s play Wild Boar, directed by Olivia Yun for the 40th Hong Kong Arts Festival; Unlock Dancing Plaza’s first serial cross-disciplinary creation, the trilogy Walls 44; and her own free-form dance theatre production Kidult Ophelia. She was also the director of movement for the Dionysus Contemporary Theatre productions Equus and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chan featured as an actress in the local independent movie Pseudo Secular, and performed and served as director of movement for O Theatre Workshop’s Black Monday and Reframe Theatre’s A Concise History of Future in Hong Kong’s New Vision Arts Festival.
Her latest production, Cattle Runway, mixes theatre, multimedia, and a live string quartet to create an exhibition-like experience of a catwalk and fast fashion that explores the dynamics of contemporary human behaviour.
Hugh Cho
A graduate of the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, Hugh Cho’s interest in choreography began during his time as Artist in Residence with Unlock Dancing Plaza, between 2010 and 2014. In 2013, Cho choreographed and performed in the dance video Eternal Sunshine shown in the Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2015 he directed the short dance film yellow alert during New Works Forum: Screendance co-presented by West Kowloon Cultural District and City Contemporary Dance Company, and was commissioned to further develop the film to be premiered in Jumping Frames International Dance Video Festival 2017. In 2016, he was invited by the Japan Contemporary Dance Network to Okinawa and Hokkaido for exchange and creation. His dance piece Made in Hong Kong was invited to the largest international contemporary dance market and festival internationale tanzmesse nrw in Germany in the same year. Cho is now based in Hong Kong as a freelance dancer, choreographer and part-time Chinese opera acrobat.
Yuh Egami
Born in Okinawa, Japan, Yuh Egami graduated from The Royal Ballet School in London and joined Hong Kong Ballet as a member of the Corps de Ballet in 2002. He assumed the additional role of Répétiteur for the Company in 2014.
With Hong Kong Ballet, Egami has danced in various works such as John Meehan’s Swan Lake, Stephen Jefferies’ and Terence Kohler’s The Nutcracker, Ronald Hynd’s Coppélia, Val Caniparoli’s Lady of the Camellias, Natalie Weir’s Turandot, George Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, Nacho Duato’s Castrati, Jorma Elo’s Shape of Glow, William Forsythe’s Steptext, and Stanton Welch’s Clear.
Egami has presented his works at Hong Kong Ballet’s Choreographers’ Showcase, including Horn (2014) and White Lies (2012) with Ricky Hu Song-wei, OIOIO (2011), Mirage (2010), Collage of One (2008), Sakula (2007) and Kagé (2005). He has also contributed choreography to several full-length works including Carmen (2017) and The Frog Prince-A Ballet Chinois (2013) together with Hu and as associate choreographer to Yuri Ng, and Firecracker (2010) as an associate choreographer to Ng. His work Bolero (2015) with Hu, won Outstanding Ensemble Performance at the Hong Kong Dance Awards 2016.
Egami also re-choreographed Ng’s Devil’s Tale for Architanz, Japan in 2015 and choreographed Sonographer (2011) and Firefly (2016) for E-side Dance Company in Hong Kong.
Joseph Lee
Born in Hong Kong, Joseph Lee began his dance training at the age of seventeen. After graduating from The Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in Professional Accountancy, he continued his dance studies at The Place, London Contemporary Dance School in UK, obtaining a Master of Arts (Contemporary Dance) in 2015. Returning to Hong Kong, Lee joined Unlock Dancing Plaza, first as an apprentice and then as a resident artist. He has worked with Crystal Pite (Kidd Pivot), Maresa Von Stockert (Tilted Production), Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh, Sue Healey, Chou Shuyi, Ong Yong Lock and Pewan Chow, and performed in France, London, Tokyo, Taiwan, Seoul, Singapore and Malaysia.
Recent choreographies include The Other End (2015), Pardon...Pardon? (2016), It tastes like you (2016), Folding Echoes (2016), Confession Ain’t Solo (2017), The Way Horse Talk; The Path We Walk (2017)
In 2016 Lee was recognised with a Chin Lin Foundation Emerging Choreographer award for his solo work Pardon…Pardon? in Seoul. His directorial debut dance video It tastes like you was screened at the South Taiwan Film Festival 2016, Jumping Frames International Dance Video Festival 2016 (Audience’s Choice Award), the Festival of Recorded Movement 2017 in Canada, and the 2017 Perth Dance Festival – Screendance Awards in Scotland.
Working with independent dance artist KT Yau, Lee recently launched the first crowdfunded dance project in Hong Kong, Re:do/ Joseph Lee/ KT Yau. His solo work Folding Echoes is currently on tour at the International Performance Festival in Mainz, Germany, the Beijing Dance Festival, the Guangdong Dance Festival, and the City Contemporary Dance Festival.
Jennifer Mok
Born in Hong Kong, Jennifer Mok graduated from the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2005 with a major in Ballet and studied modern dance the following year. In 2007, she undertook an internship with Expressions Dance Company in Australia for its US tour, before joining City Contemporary Dance Company the same year. In 2014, she left the company to work as a freelance artist. Recent performances include, the Black Bird Theatre production Freedom of Expression, the Rite of City Dance Video Project, New Works Forum: Screendance workshop co-presented by West Kowloon Cultural District and City Contemporary Dance Company. Mok’s debut choreography, A Major Clown in G Flat, presented by E-Side Dance Company in Femininity in 2015, was nominated for “Outstanding Choreography” and “Outstanding Female Dancer” at the Hong Kong Dance Awards. In February 2017 she presented her solo work You are Beautiful at the Hong Kong Jockey Club Contemporary Dance Series as part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
Mui Cheuk-yin
A student of Chinese classical and ethnic dance in Hong Kong during the 1970’s, Mui Cheuk-yin emerged as one of Hong Kong’s first generation of professional dancers, and in the 1980’s was the lead dancer in numerous dance drama productions of the Hong Kong Dance Company. In the 1990’s, Mui became an independent artist, choreographing, teaching, performing, and producing dance works in Hong Kong. Her works have been featured during the 25th and 35th Anniversaries of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, at the Lyon Biennale de la Danse, the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Venice, the Dance Biennale Tokyo, and on major stages around the world including, New York, Copenhagen, London, Paris and Beijing. Her style traverses between traditional and contemporary with effortless fluidity. Mui has won two Asian Cultural Council fellowships to study modern dance in the US, four Hong Kong Dance Awards, and in 2012 received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Hong Kong Dance Alliance. She was also recognised with an Outstanding Women Award by the Wai Yin Association in 2001.
Qiao Yang
Born in Shaanxi, Qiao Yang started learning Chinese dance at the age of 12 and has been a dancer with City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) since 1996. She received the Gold Award in the Modern Dance Duet Class at the Paris International Dance Competition in 1990, and in 1992 became a founding member of Guangdong Modern Dance Company, performing extensively at major international arts festivals. In 2003, she received a Hong Kong Dance Award and was listed in the “Hong Kong Dance Hall of Fame”. Qiao received the 2011 Hong Kong Dance Award “Outstanding Performance by a Female Dancer” for her performance in Tales of Two Cities, and was nominated for the same prize for her performance in Soledad at the 2016 Hong Kong Dance Awards.
Ivy Tsui
Independent choreographer Ivy Tsui specialises in site-specific dance. She graduated from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) in 2009 with a first-class honours degree and was recognised with the “Young Artist (dance)” award at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards in 2015. Her site-specific dance work Quan Quan, which premiered in 2011, was recreated and performed at the Kubrick bookstore in Hong Kong in 2012 and again in 2017 at the Rahva Raamat bookstore (named one of the world’s four best bookstores in 2016) in Tallinn, Estonia.
Ivy’s choreography is inspired by her passion for nature and the environment. She has created a number of commissioned works for the Hong Kong Arts Festival and the Hong Kong Leisure and Cultural Services Department, including Water Lilies (2017), Morning glory (2016), Dehydrated Flower (2015), and Frangipani (2015).
She was recently selected as one of three artists representing Hong Kong in “Creative Meeting Point: Hong Kong x Finland”, a dance exchange programme organised by the West Kowloon Cultural District and three Finnish dance institutions: Dance Info Finland, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance, and Dance House Helsinki.
Yang Yuntao
Yang Yuntao joined the Hong Kong Dance Company (HKDC) in 2002 as Principal Dancer, becoming Assistant Artistic Director in 2007 and Artistic Director in 2013. A graduate of the Faculty of Dance at the Minzu University of China, Yang has been a dancer with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, the Beijing Modern Dance Company and the City Contemporary Dance Company. He has received a number of awards at national dance competitions in China, and was recognised at the Hong Kong Dance Awards in 2003 and 2006. In 2009 he received the “Award for Best Artist (Dance)” in the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards.
Yang has choreographed for various dance companies. His choreographic works for HKDC include Border Town, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Spring Ritual‧Eulogy, Joseph Koo’s Dance Melodies 2013, The Legend of Mulan, The Butterfly Lovers, Storm Clouds, Voices and Dances of the Distant Land, L’Amour Immortel, Blanc in Reveries of the Red Chamber, and Chinese Hero: A Lone Exile. Spring Ritual‧Eulogy won the “Outstanding Achievement in Production” award at the 2013 Hong Kong Dance Awards and was presented in Beijing and Taipei in 2013. The Legend of Mulan won two awards at the 2014 Hong Kong Dance Awards and was presented in New York and Sydney in 2015, and in London in 2017. The Butterfly Lovers was presented in Korea in 2016. Storm Clouds and L’Amour Immortel won three awards at the 2015 and 2016 Hong Kong Dance Awards respectively. L’Amour Immortel was presented at the Beijing Tianqiao Performing Arts Centre and Guangzhou Opera House in July 2017.
Daniel Yeung
Daniel Yeung graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong with a major in Fine Arts and a minor in Chinese Music. He is a self-taught dancer and was twice awarded scholarships to study choreography in Holland and the UK. In 2002, Yeung was nominated by the European Ballettanz yearbook as “The Choreographer To Look At” and was awarded the “Rising Artist Award” by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. He is a six-time awardee at the Hong Kong Dance Awards (2000, 2005, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014), organised by the Hong Kong Dance Alliance, and has twice been named as one of the “Top Five Best Dance Works of the Year” by the South China Morning Post. In 2013, Yeung was recognised as “Best Artist of the Year (Dance)” by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council for his contributions as curator, choreographer, performer, teacher and critic for developing dance culture in Hong Kong.
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