Chinese dancer, 54, to defy her age with daunting 70-minute solo show
- Qiao Yang will perform “Almost 55”, the story of her life and most challenging performance of her long career, at the Hong Kong Arts Centre this month
- Choreographed by Chou Shu-yi from Taiwan, the piece also traces the development of modern dance history in China.
A star was born 54 years ago, but it would take a while for the world to notice. After all, an underfunded dance troupe in a small Chinese city was perhaps not the best place to launch an international career – especially during the Cultural Revolution.
Now, Qiao Yang is about to stake her claim as one of Asia’s top contemporary dancers. The decision also amounts to the biggest wager of her career: to perform a gruelling 70-minute solo autobiographical piece.
The piece traces how she joined the Baoji City public arts troupe as a 12-year-old apprentice; ended up in Guangzhou studying contemporary dance under Willy Tsao Sing-yuen; and later, moved to Hong Kong a year before the handover to China and became a full-time dancer at Tsao’s City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC).
Qiao has always loved to dance. The little she learned from school helped her catch the eyes of the so-called wengongtuan (cultural work troupe) recruiters in her hometown in central China’s Shaanxi province in the early 1970s. That spelt the end of a normal childhood and schooling, and the start of years of harsh, regimented classical Chinese and ballet training that would turn her into a professional performer for the workers.
Her mother agreed to it because she feared Qiao would otherwise be “sent down” to hard labour in the countryside like so many young people then.