Fighting to understand the concept of beauty

In 2018, the Hong Kong Dance Company launched a three-year-long project researching and studying Chinese martial arts. The company's dancers and the project's initiator, Yang Yuntao, who is the artistic director of the company, took weekly classes and workshops with Chinese martial arts instructors and kung fu masters.

The result is a new dance production, titled Convergence, which brings the company's findings about Chinese martial arts together with its knowledge of Chinese-style dance.

On July 15, the dance production made its Chinese mainland debut at Beijing Tianqiao Performing Arts Center. The company will travel to Urumqi to stage the production during the 6th China Xinjiang International Dance Festival on Friday and Saturday.

According to David Tsui, executive director of the Hong Kong Dance Company, Convergence was premiered with an online screening in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced performing arts venues to close temporarily.

"Chinese martial arts have a long history and they are iconic symbols of traditional Chinese culture. Of all the styles of Chinese martial arts, the Hong Kong Dance Company has explored southern Chinese martial arts and its quintessential rhythmic patterns of the body," Tsui says. He elaborated that the company has learned, and has gained an insight into, different southern Chinese martial art styles, such as Lingnan Hung Kuen, Choy Lay Fut, Fujian White Crane and baguazhang, or eight-diagram palm.

"They not only trained their bodies but also their minds. Convergence is about an exploration of stillness and motion, between dance and martial arts," he says.

Yang, a member of the Bai ethnic group, was born and raised in Dali in China's southwestern province of Yunnan. At 11, he came to Beijing to study dance at Minzu University of China. He later studied contemporary dance and joined Guangdong Modern Dance Company, one of China's first professional modern dance performance companies. In 2002, he joined Hong Kong Dance Company and has been working as its artistic director for nine years.

"I first learned Chinese-style dance and then contemporary dance. Later, I returned to Chinese-style dance. I often ask myself the question, 'what is Chinese-style dance?' And I want to go deeper and look into its history and evolution. This three-year-long project has helped us learn the connection between Chinese martial arts and Chinese-style dance," says Yang. "Convergence is a team effort. Along with the dancers of the company, I hoped to create something new, although we had no idea where it would lead us."

The beauty of Chinese martial arts is in its power, strength and stillness, Yang says. For Chinese-style dance, the beauty lies in its elegance.

"What we learned from the project, especially regarding the philosophy of martial arts, allowed us to rethink about our body movements as dancers and gain a new understanding of the concept of beauty," he says.

Having been fascinated with Chinese martial arts for a very long time, Yang has choreographed and directed dance productions that were inspired by Chinese history and traditional Chinese art, including The Legend of Mulan, Storm Clouds and Chinese Hero: A Lone Exile.

"From Bruce Lee's internationally famous kung fu films, to the widely-read martial arts novels by Louis Cha Leung-yung, Hong Kong plays quite a crucial role in promoting and popularizing Chinese martial arts," says Tsang Kee-kung, board chairman of Hong Kong Dance Company. Since its establishment in 1981, the company has been celebrating traditional Chinese culture, especially martial arts, he says.

The performance of Convergence in the capital was co-hosted by the Office of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China in Beijing.

According to Amy Yuen, the office's deputy director, as well as the Hong Kong Dance Company, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra and Hong Kong's theater groups have also staged performances on the Chinese mainland this year. An exhibition about Hong Kong's pop culture, such as movies and music, was held in several Chinese cities, including Lanzhou, Harbin and Shenyang, to mark the 26th anniversary of Hong Kong's return to the motherland.