SWEDEN'S CULLBERG Ballet will this week return for its third Hong Kong appearance. Following up on performances in 1979 and 1992, Cullberg will stage three award-winning original works about dreams, murder, inter-racial conflict and familial love. It will also offer a series of lectures and workshops.
When Birgit Cullberg founded the company in 1967, she did so with only eight handpicked international dancers, including three Swedes. Although Cullberg's passion and trademark humour have remained, the company has changed greatly. Described by The Scotsman as a group 'forcing us to think firmly outside the box', the Cullberg Ballet has performed in more than 40 countries.
'Today, Cullberg is a mixed community, with dancers from different cultural backgrounds,' says artistic director Johan Inger. 'I hope Cullberg will perform more in Asia. Cullberg has performed in Taiwan and South Korea, and there are talks about going to China. Of course, Hong Kong is the place Cullberg should visit more often, because it's important for the audience to see the development and different aspects of a group. In the late 1990s, I was in Hong Kong, as a member of the Nederlands Dans Theatre. Hong Kong was a strange place, a melting pot of the east and the west, but I liked it very much.'
Inger is the choreographer of two of the three pieces to be performed in Hong Kong : Home and Home and Out of Breath. The third, A Sort of, is the work of Mats Ek, Cullberg's son and the ballet's former artistic director. '[The ballet] is dealing with, in the theatrical sense, human feelings,' Inger says. 'Home and Home was partly inspired by a murder that happened about a week before I worked on the piece. Things were happening in my personal life, and death was on my mind. It became clear that the story was what I wanted.'
The 2001 murder was big news in Sweden. A young woman from a Muslim background fell in love with a Swedish man, so her father and brother killed her. In Home and Home, the sense of sadness and being in danger is everywhere. But with movements from classical ballet, jazz and hip-hop, the situation is also translated into something beautiful and uplifting. As the story unfolds, the home represented on stage as a dark corner decorated with a pot of flowers, becomes a space where one confronts and yet overcomes death.
'I was also trying to explore 'women' in the dance,' says Inger. 'That has something to do with my background. My parents were divorced and I used to live with my father. In Home and Home, the male figures don't suppress the women. They just represent the weakness in the women themselves.' Home and Home received the Herald Angel prize at the 2003 Edinburgh International Festival.
'Actually, Out of Breath is also about death,' he says. 'But it's darker and more abstract. It doesn't have a situation like Home and Home.' In this dance, three men and three women search for a place in life, sometimes sadly, sometimes humorously. They walk and run on the stage, around something that looks both like an iceberg and a sand dune. They stand in each other's way and push each other away, much as people do in real life.