The Great Learning follows the lives of secondary school students, Yin, Sau, Hua, Fatso and Ling, characters who we first met in 2016’s Chinese Lesson, a play that was named by SCMP as one of HKAF’s “best drama productions […] in recent years”. The Great Learning examines the millenial generation’s state of mind in the years following Hong Kong’s umbrella movement; between street clashes, university protests and social disillusionment, this sequel tells the story of power-plays, lies, betrayal and other dark truths, as the young adults take vicious paths to work their way out from the ruptures of their youth. The play takes its title from Confucius’s The Great Learning, which holds that “things being investigated, knowledge became complete”. As the young students “investigate” and encounter difficulties along the way, finally they are able to come to terms with the realities they live in.

Gravitas is a 30 minute duet that combines contemporary dance and acrobatics.

The duet takes place on a six by six metre air-floor mattress that is traditionally used as a gymnastics learning tool. It functions as the stage and allows the duet to be performed virtually anywhere. This serves the company’s aim of broadening contemporary dance and introducing it to new communities. The air-floor also distorts the normal relationship we have with the ground and with gravity.

Gravity is the central theme of the piece. We explore new possibilities brought up by this new ground and try to push ourselves to the limits of this exploration.

We challenge acrobatics, a physical language normally concerned with success, by showing the beauty of its failure. We also challenge contemporary dance by applying choreography to acrobatics and broadening the dance vocabulary. By challenging both forms we attempt to blur the lines between the languages of dance and acrobatics, and in doing so we also redefine the traditional separation of high art and popular culture.

The piece also questions ideas of manhood and boyhood. The two performers play recklessly with each other and with the audience. They try to regain a sense of fearlessness that is usually lost after childhood. At the same time, as men, their interactions are competitive and at times violent.

The audience sits around the stage, surrounding the performers and creating an image of a boxing arena or a kind of communal ritual. The spectators can see, hear, smell and sense the performers. They also see other spectators, mirroring their expressions of fear, joy and laughter.

Is the performer there to entertain, and at what cost? Can a real, empathic connection occur, even outside in the street? Can we dance a new kind of dance?

In Between Tiny Cities, dancers Erak Mith from Phnom Penh and Aaron Lim from Darwin, Australia use the rituals, movement styles and language of their shared hip-hop culture to reveal the dramatically different worlds that surround them and uncover the choreographic links that unite them.

Choreographed by internationally-renowned Sydney hip-hop dance artist Nick Power and accompanied by the beats and sound design of Jack Prest, the work blends the raw, wild energy of b-boy battles with skilful improvisation and choreography, offering a cross-cultural perspective on style, culture and locality.

The project is the result of a four-year dance exchange between Darwin’s D-City Rockers and Cambodia’s Tiny Toones youth programme. The two crews have travelled, trained, battled and performed together, and Between Tiny Cities is the culmination of that exchange.

if it’s all in my veins disrupts and reimagines the history of contemporary dance, unmoored from time and place in the digital age. Inter-generational cast Hellen Sky, Michelle Ferris and Georgia Bettens are accompanied by animated GIFs displaying excerpts of dance iconography. These tiny moments of dance history, reformulated through internet culture, are re-embodied on stage.

Furthermore the dancers are responsible for their own means of production, to speak in Marxist terms, moving stage lights to frame each GIF of dance history that they embody. Here, the labour of theatrical production is not hidden but exposed as the work re-constructs dance history before the audience’s eyes. if it’s all in my veins is a flamboyant and prophetic statement on how the past is produced and reproduced.

“We wanted to revisit the struggles that our dance has encountered to redefine our present dancing bodies. How can we envision our dance’s future if we proclaim it’s no longer possible to think through ‘a’ future? Is dance history over? Where do we direct our fiery optimism? What other histories might it give way to?”

Dance against globalisation paranoia

On arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv in 2008, African-American dancer Abdur Rahim Jackson, a member of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was taken to a separate room. In a bizarre twist, Jackson was forced to dance before the border security officers to prove his profession.

In “Dance, if you want to enter my country!”, Vienna-based Japanese artist Michikazu Matsune investigates this peculiar incident through his sharp analysis with poetical irony. An interdisciplinary performance merging dance, text, video and photography, it examines the extent to which the borders between nationality, ethnicity and identity may be challenged from the position of the individual.

An artist who seeks to reflect socio-political issues of today with his works, Matsune puts globalisation paranoia, profiling and surveillance critically under the spotlight.

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Entering its seventh year, this edition places a spotlight on cross-border inspiration, international collaboration and long-term strategic artistic goals, with the featured artists’ experimentation revealing fresh dimensions to contemporary dance in Hong Kong. A highlight of Hong Kong’s contemporary dance scene, Dance Off continues to blaze new trails as works from the series catch the eye of the international dance scene and receive invitations from festivals and competitions across the globe. This year’s showcase sees the return of Tracy Wong, who reflects on the condition of one’s self being filled with pressures from the outside world. Sudhee Liao probes the performer’s relationship with a hyper-real dance space, and Felix Ke examines fear of death by drawing inspiration from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise. Rex Cheng revamps the physical movements of Chinese opera in a contemporary dance duet, while award-winning street dancer Solong Zhang dances his dream of living as his authentic self. First-time choreographers Alice Ma and Evains Lui explore the sense of trust amongst city-dwellers and the state of our breathing in everyday life with their respective works.