Hong Kong Ballet dancers strive to discover what lies beyond the classics
East is definitely meeting West when it comes to Hong Kong Ballet, a 33-year-old company that arrives at the St. Sauveur Arts Festival this month, eight years after appearing in Canada for the first time. All three works on the program – Peter Quanz’s Luminous, Nils Christe’s Symphony in Three Movements and Kinsun Chan’s Black on Black – are in contemporary Western mode, whereas virtually all of the company’s dancers were trained in Chinese academies that enforce a strict classical ballet aesthetic.
“The mainland Chinese dancers who come to Hong Kong do it because they want to develop and realize there’s something more out there than the classics,” artistic director Madeleine Onne noted in a telephone interview from Hong Kong. A Swede who has led Hong Kong Ballet for the past three years, Onne had a major career at the Royal Swedish Ballet, first as principal dancer and then as artistic director for six years.
“About 80 per cent of our dancers come from mainland China. (One exception is Canadian Jessica Burrows.) They’re so perfect in their bodies. (Academy assessors) measure them before they enter the Beijing or Shanghai dance academy to make sure they have perfect measurements, otherwise they won’t even bring them into the school.”
Anyone who has seen a class at the National Ballet of China’s Beijing studios will readily understand. (Incidentally, the company is coming to Montreal in February.) Without exception, the female dancers are slim, long-legged, long-neck candidates for all those swans and sylphs who populate the 19th-century classical repertory. Getting them to turn, jump and point their feet is a breeze. Getting them to understand the motivation behind the movements is more troublesome.
“I’ve been working a lot about why they are doing a movement,” Onne said. “In the beginning, they’d reply, ‘Because they did that on the video.’ Not a good answer. If you don’t know yourself why you’re doing a movement, how will I understand?”
Cultural attitudes are hard to break. In Hong Kong, Onne noted, no one on the street will look in your eyes. And in the dance studio, during a passionate pas de deux, her dancers would be looking the whole time at the floor.
“They thought I was absolutely cuckoo because I kept saying, ‘Look into each other’s eyes.’ ”
Nonetheless, Onne finds her Chinese dancers open and hungry for discovery, which is why she’s bringing in such groundbreaking foreign choreographers as Germany’s Christian Spuck and, next season, Nacho Duato, both known in Montreal for their work with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens.
“I have to go slowly and find contemporary dance that’s not extreme. The audience can take it if it’s a modern company, but because we’re a ballet company, they have dif- ferent expectations.”
Onne is equally insistent on hiring contemporary choreographers with an Asian background, like Fei Bo, resident choreographer of the National Ballet of China, and Kinsun Chan, who was born in Vancouver of Chinese parents from Hong Kong.
Chan has performed with regional U.S. ballet companies, but more recently has worked and choreographed in Europe, principally in Switzerland. Drawing heavily on classical ballet technique, he created Black on Black for Hong Kong Ballet last year to music by Henryk Gorecki.
Quanz choreographed Luminous for the company two years ago, before making his fine latest creation for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Rodin/Claudel. Luminous displays the fickleness of romantic partners, and some of its sinewy sensuality appears to have carried over into Rodin/Claudel (the scene involving living statues in nude bodysuits).
Veteran choreographer Christe created Symphony in Three Movements for Belgium’s Royal Ballet of Flanders in 1983, 11 years after Balanchine choreographed a memorable work to the same Stravinsky story. Ostensibly about war, the work’s final movement has a rhythm whose pounding, said Onne, “shows off our male dancers.”