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Hong Kong BalletMay 2003 Hong Kong, City Hall Theatre by Kevin Ng |
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Hong Kong Ballet opened their new 2003/4 season by presenting a mixed-bill programme on the small stage of the City Hall Theatre last week consisting of three plotless works by different choreographers. The evening commenced with the American choreographer David Allan's ballet "Dreams of Tenderness and Solitude" set to a pleasant music score by Karl Jenkins. The ballet, created last year for six couples, is quite well crafted offering a variety of moods and rhythms. Allan's choreography is fluent and flows logically. Lively allegro sections contrast well with the two pas de deux, and there is a discernible shape and structure to the ballet which ends with an exciting climax. There is humour in some passages too which is welcome. Particularly memorable is a bouncy pas de trois, and the second more lyrical pas de deux which was well danced by Faye Leung and Nobuo Fujino. The first duet however was too cute for my liking. A good contrast to this chamber piece was an ensemble work "The Rite of Spring", created a year ago by the Australian choreographer Natalie Weir for the graduation performance of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. The theme of the sacrifice of a young woman in a tribe as an offering to the heavens in Stravinsky's music was effectively conveyed by some powerful choreography for the corps de ballet expressing the savagery of this primitive tribe. A horizontal line-up of the whole community resembling a chorus line at one point was suitably menacing. Nobuo Fujino dazzled in a frantic solo. All the dancers seemed to relish dancing the contorted and skewed movements in Weir's choreography. The weakest piece was the middle ballet "Tango Ballet Tango" created in 2000 by the artistic director Stephen Jefferies whose choreography failed to reconcile the tango form with the classical ballet vocabulary. There was a lack of differentiation in the mood and character of the three pas de deux, and the whole ballet was a tame affair with hardly any passion and fire as would have been expected from a tango. The only excitement in this insubstantial ballet was a tense dance for Faye Leung being continuously lifted by two men - Liang Jing and Nobuo Fujino. This mixed programme certainly suits the Hong Kong Ballet's dancers better than some of the mediocre productions of full-length story ballets based on Chinese folklore premiered by the company in the past, e.g. "The White Snake" by the choreographer Domy Reiter-Soffer. More mixed-bill programmes, which have become very rare in recent seasons, would be most welcome for the audiences and dancers alike in the future.
(This article first appeared in the South China Morning Post.)
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