Hong Kong Cool introduces local choreographers and artists in collaboration in a mixed bag

Hong Kong Ballet’s annual Choreographers’ Showcase has been rechristened Hong Kong Cool and given a new twist – the aspiring choreographers from within the company have each been paired with a local artist from another medium, such as visual arts or music, to create their pieces.

While the idea is a good one, as so often with experimentation the results were disappointing, with much of the work showing little sense of mutual inspiration from its joint creators.

The high point of the evening was Ricky Hu Songwei’s When You See. In the centre of the darkened stage a male dancer (Luis Cabrera) wearing only black trousers lies on a mirrored floor, holding a small globe of light that he manipulates around his body in such a way that it seems to be moving on its own. At the end it rises gently spinning into the sky and vanishes, leaving Cabrera bereft on the ground.

The way the light moves and changes, the reflections from the surface below and the sculptural quality of Cabrera’s half-naked torso is riveting. There’s also a sense of profound emotion, both from the dancer and the choreography and from the subtle, haunting music composed and led on guitar by Olivier Cong – a great example of how choreographer and composer can inspire each other. Superbly performed by Cabrera, this is a beautiful piece, original and compelling, and deserves to be seen again.

Hu’s frequent choreographic partner, Yuh Egami, has often experimented with integrating video with dance. Working with his regular collaborator James Kong and composer Mike Yip, in Wordless Letter Egami takes the words of Virginia Woolf’s suicide note and projects them, at first in sequence then in random patterns from which individual words pop out, while Chen Zhiyao and Forrest Rain Oliveros dance a convoluted duet at the front of the stage.