Hong Kong Ballet

The Hong Kong Ballet’s Choreographic Showcase for 2011 takes the five elements of Metal, Wood, Water, Fire and Earth as inspiration, highlighting their power to create, destroy, control, and dissolve.

The programme presents five dancers from The Hong Kong Ballet– Li Yi-ran, Yuh Egami, Kenji Hidaka, Ricky Hu and Jonathan Spigner – who will be stepping into the role of choreographers to create dance pieces interpreting the themes of human relationships, the precarious balance between man and our planet and new beginnings. 

It's a good opportunity for me to learn from this workshop performance. As suggested by the name, it's a choreographic showcase. So it's kind of informal and relax performance, which sometimes confuses audiences during the process because it's really hard to tell the dancers are actually performing or rehearsing.  Why? Because in one performance, the choreographer also go onto the stage and try to give instruction and  comfort the " nervous " dancers . And during the "formal" performance, the choreographer is recoding the performance on the stage in a way which has no trace of performance.  It's very hard to tell whether the choreographer is performing with the dancer or not. All this elements make the baller like a drama, a theatre, a backdrop show.  This kind of arrangement is really good because it present all the happening behind the curtain. It make audiences understand things like :how a ballet/dance is been choreographed; What kind of journey does the dance has to go through before he can really master the role; What's the body of a dancer......

For me, the show is kinda of introduction to the dancing world and makes me to understand the ballet, the body better. Most importantly, the show helps me to understand that the boundary of different arts can be so blur. Ballet can be drama; theatre can be dance..... This even shattered my original understanding of the social/academic/ industrial disciplines.