CAPTIVATING MOVES

Eddy Zee, head of performing arts at Tai Kwun, said in a recent interview that he wished to put on the kind of shows that Hong Kong's performance art scenario had been "missing". Indeed, Tai Kwun seems to have taken a no-holds-barred approach toward hosting and supporting a range of bold and not-particularly-beautiful recent experiments in performance art. The inaugural dance season lineup seems to underscore the fact that dance does not necessarily have to be easy on the eye to be exciting and/or meaningful.

Some of the pieces in the lineup might strike the unaccustomed eye as too amorphous to be even listed under dance. At one point in Bill Coleman's Dollhouse, for instance, the only movement on stage is of three pans juddering on hot plates, letting out steam (the sound art is by Gordon Monahan).

Coleman plays a man in the throes of a world collapsing around him. Following the chaos and disintegration of most of the props on stage, the dancer makes a passage through what could be a post-apocalyptic winter. The audience is left teetering with apprehension when he dances barefoot on a stage littered with pieces of broken plastic and open-mouthed rat traps.

To read full article, click here.