Arts preview: Dance Kho's White, at the Fringe Club, explores fragility
Sitting in a quiet corner of a Central coffee shop, Kirsten Ho and Stéphanie Janaina look like two friends enjoying their day out.
WHITE
Dance Kho
Sitting in a quiet corner of a Central coffee shop, Kirsten Ho and Stéphanie Janaina look like two friends enjoying their day out.
The two dancer-choreographers first met each other eight years ago, when they were training at New York's Alvin Ailey American Dance Centre. They went back to their homes in Hong Kong and Mexico after their last production together at the Avant-Garde Festival at Judson Church in New York in 2009.
But they stayed in touch, following each other's professional career while maturing with their respective companies.
"When we worked together in New York, there was definitely a connection — it's a connection that's never going to die," says Hong Kong-based Ho, founder of the two-year-old company Dance Kho.
"Even though we never said, 'OK, in five years' time let's meet up and do it again,' I knew that our relationship was never going to just fizzle out." So here they are: two 29-year-olds presenting their first collaboration in five years, at the Fringe Club.
It is the first Dance Kho production for which Ho — her company's only resident choreographer — has enlisted a co-creator. "Working with a co-choreographer gives you another perspective and takes you out of any groove that you've got yourself in," she says. "I really enjoy it."
may also be seen as a testament to the duo's lasting friendship as Janaina, who's based in Mexico, came here for four months specifically to create and perform the contemporary dance piece.
Taking the colour white as a metaphor, it revolves around the theme of fragility, and the idea of permanence, both of which are subjects that Janaina has been studying for the past two years. "When you're young, you're told that you'll get stronger as you grow up and everything will be under control," she says. "But I soon figured out that the more you grow up, the more vulnerable you become."
Ho says she's drawn to the universality of the subject. "It doesn't matter where you're from — everyone has felt vulnerable at some point," says the choreographer, whose cross-cultural production includes four dancers from China, the Philippines, Japan and Mexico.
"The subject of fragility is very enriching," adds Janaina. "The way we show it in Mexico — or Paris, where I'm also from — is very different from the way you relate to it in Asia. It's in your body language. It's in the way you move your body."