HKartsFestival@TaiKwun

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun: Video Letters

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun

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HKartsFestival@TaiKwun: Art on the Move

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun: Open Sesame

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun: Order Now

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun: This Way to Visit Room

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun: Video Letters

Date & Time

12 - 20 Jun, 2021 12-14 June & 19-20 June, 2021
4 pm

Location

Laundry Steps

Price

Free of charge

General

Presented by

 HKartsFestival@TaiKwun is part of the 49th Hong Kong Arts Festival.

 HKartsFestival@TaiKwun is solely sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust.

#CommunityDance #InclusiveArt

Hong Kong – Shenyang: A Movement Dialogue on Video 

Artist Yuenjie Maru, a champion of symbiotic dance in Hong Kong, will collaborate with choreographer Lin Yingchi, a new generation Tai Chi virtuoso in Shenyang, to facilitate an exchange of video letters between two communities of different cultural contexts and different physical abilities, to explore the communicative power of movement and images.

Using tai chi motifs as a starting point, the community dancers in Shenyang will send out the first invitation-to-respond to their Hong Kong counterparts in the form of a video. The Hong Kong community dancers will “translate” their reply into physical movement, record it on camera and then send it to Shenyang. In co-creating the “video letters”, the artists will engage in a dialogue between the two cities that embraces diversity and fosters inclusiveness.

A finale performance, in which the dancers from the two cities finally meet in real-time online, is planned on-site at Tai Kwun to celebrate the connection they have built.

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun: Video Letters
12-14 June & 19-20 June, 2021
4 pm
Laundry Steps
Duration: approx 45 min
Free admission


Production Team

Facilitators: yuenjie MARU (Hong Kong) & Lin Yingchi (Shenyang)
Video Director: Abby Wan (Hong Kong)
Camera operators: Fang Zheng (Shenyang) & community dancers from Hong Kong and Shenyang            
Live Music: Nelson Hiu (Hong Kong)
Programme Coordinator: Scarlette Cheng@Artscompana (Hong Kong)
Stage Manager: David Tang (Hong Kong)

Community Dancers:
Hong Kong: Chan Hoi Ki, Polly Chan, Trada Ip, Candy Lee, Fifi Ng, Nancy Poon, Pooja Sharma, Susanna So, Joy Yau 
Shenyang: Alex Chi, Chi Haobo, Hui Pengjun, Li Min, Liu Zhehong, Luo Zhanqiang, Qi Helong, Su Chengzhang, Sophia Sun, Wang Jingmei, Wang Tianqi, Wang Zhixue, Wang Zhuofei, Wei Te, Zhao Guangcan

Accessibility partner: Arts with the Disabled Association Hong Kong 

A Hong Kong Arts Festival Production
 


The Artists

yuenjie MARU

Yuenjie is an experienced inclusive dance facilitator, a (contact) improvisation dancer, a live art performer and a life sketches artist. His creations include dance, theatre, drawing, writing, and installation art. He is the founder of Make & Move and Danotcers in Hong Kong and the artistic advisor of Mistakable Symbiotic Dance Troupe in Guangzhou. Based on the concept of DanceAbilty, he has been developing and promoting symbiotic dance locally and overseas. He received the DanceAbility Teacher Certification in 2012 and Contakids Teacher Certification in 2017.

Lin Yingchi

Lin Yingchi is an independent choreographer, dancer, Tai chi virtuoso and currently the artistic director of Yingchi Dance Theater. Lin received two master’s degrees from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts respectively. Influenced by somatics, meditation, yoga and Tai Chi, her works and teaching focus on holistic approaches with here-and-now body awareness.

Lin has active interest in site-specific dance. She has worked with artists from different countries across a variety of disciplines, such as installation art, video, multi-media, architecture, music, literature and performing arts. In Tai Chi, she has received awards in numerous national and international martial arts competitions.

Abby Wan

Wan graduated from the Department of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, majoring in new media art. For the past seven years, she has been working on documentary film productions as cinematographer and editor. Her cinematography and editing works include A Tale in a City – Her Story (2015); Me, My City or Somewhere Else (2017) and Ode to Bookpeople (2020). Other editing works include Reading Xi Xi (2014) and Franco Mella (2018). Wan is also a graphic designer, particularly of film posters and books.

Nelson Hiu

Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Nelson Hiu is a fourth-generation descendant of Chinese and Japanese immigrants. His interest in music, improvisation and self-discovery began as a secondary school student during the tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. Hiu is a multi-instrumentalist. He studied ethno-musicology at the University of Hawaii. He has been living in Hong Kong since 1985 as a teacher at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Hiu has also been a founding member of many new music ensembles in Hawaii and Hong Kong, including Nuclear Tan, Pagan Babies, Gain Dangerous Visions, Pet Project Hawaii, Uncarved Block, CIMG (Collective Improvisational Music Group), Little Red Truck, Dancing Stone and Yihk, and has extensive collaborations in dance and theatre. He has performed music for dance in Hawaii, Arizona, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Utah, New York City, Switzerland, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.

Scarlette Cheng

Scarlette Cheng is a certified DanceAbility® Master Teacher and a registered social worker. She has worked as a facilitator, choreographer and coordinator in various inclusive dance projects with participants of various ages and abilities. Trained in Austria and the USA, she regularly holds inclusive dance programmes, both locally and overseas. In 2016, she shared her inclusive dance experience at the Joint World Conference on Social Work, Education and Social Development (SWSD) in Seoul. In 2019, she was invited to work as coordinator and artistic director for ON DISPLAY GLOBAL - Hong Kong station; the resulting video features participants from different cities and was presented at the headquarters of the United Nations. Her recent works include “My Unlimited Stage” (dance video with audio description). She is currently the Programme Director of Artscompana.  scarlettecheng.wix.com/dance


The above content is provided by Hong Kong Arts Festival