Not all dancers have the interest, or talent, to choreograph. Hong Kong Ballet's Yuh Egami has both. The Okinawa native has been creating works and entering competitions since he was a teenager. He recently helped stage a fund-raising performance for earthquake and tsunami victims in northeastern Japan, while one of his works, Firecracker, a full-length contemporary ballet co-choreographed with Yuri Ng Yue-lit last year, is shortlisted for two prizes at next week's Hong Kong Dance Awards.
Right now, however, the only thing on Egami's mind is a new work he has written that Hong Kong Ballet will perform this weekend in a showcase that will also feature choreography by Li Yi-ran, Kenji Hidaka, Ricky Hu and Jonathan Spigner, and guest choreographers Yuri Ng and Wang Sizheng from the National Ballet of China.
The choreographers were asked to base their work on one of the five elements in Chinese philosophy - metal, wood, water, fire and earth. Twenty-eight-year-old Egami chose the hardest element, in more ways than one.
'I picked metal because I wanted to challenge myself - and the decision has taught me a lot,' says Egami, who recruited fellow dancers Ye Feifei, Li Jia-bo and Li Lin to perform in his conceptual piece.
'Firstly, I researched the history of metal, when it was discovered and how it's used in our day-to-day life. I came to realise that pretty much everything we can see, that has a shape, has metal in it ... it represents something that stabilises.'
Egami says metal is a complex material: it can attack and protect at the same time, it is a metaphor for both connection and separation. To convey this duality on stage, he selected four music tracks with different tempos to be played simultaneously: the audience will hear one track while watching the three dancers, each moving to music only they can hear via a pair of headphones. But after a certain number of beats, the rhythm of the four tracks - and the dancers' movements - will synchronise for a moment with the music played to the house.
