FIRST Creation Platform

Blue Ka-wing

When I watched The Neighbour by Blue Ka-wing in 2015, modest elements such as bodies, lights and music cohered into a dance work about an individual’s experience of life. Then there was Time Lag, which began from the idea of being late to explore the rhythm of movements. Blue’s creative process starts from her first-hand experience of life and then moves on to interrogating the relationship between the body and the mind, as seen in The Invisible S, which was part of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, and her recent short dance film. She is continuously searching for new directions, closely examining her subjects of interest and trying her best to experiment.

Among her many creative directions, Blue Ka-wing has kept some and let go of others. For instance, through West Kowloon’s Creative Meeting Point (CMP) in 2019, she explored the relationship between the body’s movement and the mind alongside local artists in Melbourne. Having felt that she had experimented with many different methods, she decided to put this direction to rest until further ideas arise. Whereas, her practice of taking daily life experience as points of creative departure has continued. The restaging of The Neighbour in 2020 was larger in scale and made use of more types of media. Her recent short dance film Basketball Player Dances was also inspired from life.

Blue Ka-wing started making short dance video works due to the pandemic and developed a newfound interest in this medium. But she intends to continue creating live performances – although making dance video works can help her process different desires, live performances also present good challenges and training that teach her to let go and become more adaptable. Now, she hopes to develop both directions in parallel.

Alice Ma

Since Wu, the work of Alice Ma has always revealed dark undertones beneath a veneer of comical parody, such as the darkness underneath the bright appearance of Wu and the overt manipulation in Over-Master. Although her works were not created from a female perspective, they are able to call attention to female subjectivity. The interrogation in Dingdingdingding and the silent mock oration in I Don’t Mean It reflect certain states in contemporary society. Besides her physical movements, Alice also puts thought into the sound, props and set design in her performances. She makes good use of sound design to highlight the theme of the dance, and the set design and props neatly present each piece’s key concepts.

However simple a set design may be, it still takes preparation. Alice mentioned that her use of augmented reality (AR) this time was in part due to touring considerations, but also because the application of technology is an inevitable trend, and the pandemic has only sped up everyone’s incorporation of it. She clearly knows that it is not a change in creative direction, but a way to learn more about AR so that she can utilise it as a tool to enhance her creative expression, just as stage, lights and sound effects. Regarding her takeaway from CMP, although she did not see spectacular performances during her overseas exchange, she discovered that all the works had a lot of individuality, which is uncommon in Hong Kong. It is very easy to try different things in Hong Kong, but this also makes it easy for one to lose direction and character. This is why she wants to focus on developing in one direction.

KT Yau

KT Yau’s mentors have pointed out how each of her works is distinctively different, making it difficult for her to explain her individual characteristics and style when pitching. Indeed, KT’s works are eclectic. The first performance of hers that I watched was a self-choreographed solo work, Remain Invisible, which objectifies the body and plays with the audience’s expectations. The ensemble works she later choreographed, including Unmixed, I.I.I and Confine, make use of the classroom, the home, prison cell and product launch as the setting, and her latest production Six Mouths imagines six different worlds presented as individual compartments. Every work is unique, but at close inspection, there is a consistent thread of exploring and reimagining the body.

KT practised yoga more frequently during the pandemic, which made her pay more attention to muscle micromovements and her own body when dancing. From there, she started to reflect on the traces of time on the body of a thirty-something, and how to record such state, and dance is no longer her main motivation for exploring the body. Collaborations with creative practitioners from different disciplines in recent years have expanded her perspective on performance. West Kowloon’s CMP gave her the opportunity to see the creative process of overseas artists and many other performances and exhibitions unrelated to dance. These cultural exchanges helped her to slowly develop the direction of her practice, conceptualise Six Mouths and contemplate how to move forward with her other creative works.

Justyne Li

Whether solo, duet or ensemble dance, Justyne Li’s works reflect her persistence in exploring movement. Her fast and varied movements that precisely convey narratives and emotions are especially memorable. Justyne was originally trained in ballet, so her early works, such as Galatea X co-choreographed with Wong Tan-ki, are filled with the movement vocabulary of ballet. She later incorporated more movements of different contemporary dance styles into her works. Although the spectrum of movements in her solo The Shift and ensemble works such as Ode to Joy and Solo Together have clearly widened, what remains is her focus on meticulous movements.

In the past few years, much has happened in Hong Kong and around the world. Works such as The Shift, Ode to Joy and Solo Together seem to be responding to our contemporary times to different extents. Justyne points out that these global changes have not only affected her, but all artists and the state of the world at large. Regarding the influence that a place and environment can have on a person, she recalls her exchange experience in Finland as part of the CMP programme in 2019. Although she had lived in Europe for several years before and experienced its winters, the severe Finnish winter left deep impression on her. In such an environment, she thought about the inseparable relationship between nature and human beings, and the environment is more significant than individuals. The short dance film Come Rain or Shine was born from this – these risks and experiences all nourish her work and inspire her to keep creating.

Wong Pik-kei (Rebecca)

There are not many choreographers in Hong Kong exploring the female body, sexuality and desire, and even fewer who unabashedly focuses on choreography excavating these themes like Wong Pik-kei. Since her early work 19841012, she has questioned the relationship between the female body and its autonomy. Learning Butoh at later stage has deepened the motivation and stylistic choices behind her movements and narratives. Bird-Watching and Under ∞ Line ask the audience to confront nude bodies, challenging their conventional reception and imagination of the body and the nude. Her creations have paved a new direction for the art of dance in Hong Kong.

The search for the body’s autonomy and respect for an individual’s freedom of choice are what motivate Rebecca’s works, and they are also her takeaway from CMP. She found that there are also people against the nude in seemingly liberal Europe, which made her think about how individuals are entitled to their own opinions and have the right to choose. Even though Rebecca has continued her creative practice in the past few years, she candidly admits that she was in a bit of a slump and no longer knew why she should continue to create; there was no method or way to break through. But through participating in FIRST this time, she feels ready to search for a way out, hoping to re-establish her relationship with the audience, try to interact with them and continue to provoke them to think about respecting different choices.

Ivy Tsui

I became acquainted with Ivy Tsui since from her first full-length piece Dehydrated Flower, and later watched her solo dance works Frangipani and Morning Glory, as well as the experimental piece dance Water Lilies. I remember her dedication to bodily movements, exploration of improvisation and attention to sound effects. It is only through our conversation this time that I learnt that her reason behind using sound as a key element is of consideration for the environment – she finds it difficult to throw away thoughtfully designed props after just a few days of performance. That was why she turned to focus on the adaptable element of sound, which is transformative, ambient and reusable. CMP influenced her thoughts on the body in her creative practice, which is coincidentally related to the theme of “reusability”. As she could only bring limited luggage to the overseas exchange, she had to plan carefully what to pack in advance. Isn’t her own body both a daily necessity and a tool to facilitate the exchange?

Ivy enjoys the sensational and sensorial memory that dance gives her body, and her greatest satisfaction from performance is to share these memories, such as directly interacting with the audience as a cultural ambassador or through site-specific works such as QuanQuan. But after 2019, she lost confidence in her body and was no longer sure what else it could express. This uncertainty led her to repeatedly reflect on her creative direction and artistic practice. Following such rumination, she decided to pursue further studies to inspect this state and process the relationship between her individuality, body and dance, as well as to reflect and shape her future with dance through practice. She started from developing dance vocabulary, shaping the physicality and texture of the body, creating atmosphere, exploring the possibilities of audience interaction and the sharing of dance in non-theatre spaces. Through creating more works and experimenting with different formats, Ivy continues to articulate, search for and expand the definition of dance.

The uncertainties and near standstill of the local creative environment in the past three years are finally coming to an end. Perhaps the inaugural edition of FIRST Creation Platform would provide a sneak peek of the future creative directions of these six choreographers.

Text: Daisy Chu
English Translation: Narratives Studio