A FAINT ITALIAN-ACCENTED voice trickles down the phone line linking Hong Kong with Amsterdam. The voice belongs to the elfish, shaven-headed Emio Greco, one of the hottest names in modern dance. This emerging talent's groundbreaking style - a form of manic movement of his own invention - is causing critics to speak of shamanic powers and miracles on stage.
It seems, then, a shame not to be meeting him face to face. yet it doesn't seem to matter at the end of an hour of fascinating discussion about dance: Greco is as elegant with words as he is with his body.
Local dance lovers will have a chance to see him perform during the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Since he set up the revolutionary dance company Emio Greco/PC in 1995, he and his creative partner, the Dutch theatre director Pieter C. Scholten, have been astounding audiences and critics with daring and innovative dance theatre that brings metaphysics and philosophical questions into a physical space.
Greco's particular style of dance is so astounding it is described as having a 'shamanic intensity'. He races across the stage, flipping from mad explosions of movement to sudden and absolute stillness. His shows have thrilled dance enthusiasts, philosophers and mathematicians. The performances inspired the Flemish philosopher Antoon Van Den Braembrussche to write a paper on the trilogy Fra Cervello E Movimento in 2001.
'Dance for me, is to penetrate or to travel through something,' Greco says in initially wobbly English. (He's fluent in four languages, and soon warms up.) 'The dancer is able to create time and space. It's a philosophical theory, but with the body it can become very real. It means measuring time, and the ability of the body to be conscious of that measuring. Something happens not because of a movement, but an awareness of time moving by. The time can be a fraction of a second or minutes. It allows me to create acceleration or disappearance, or a vacuum.'
Greco's manipulation of his body, and the curiosity with which he approaches dance, is a testament to a lack of formal training in his youth. His is the story of how a peasant child from southern Italy became a modern dance and choreographic sensation, how failure and difference was grasped and turned into gold. Billy Elliot, eat your heart out.