22-01-24
In the Western world, martial art is the art of motion. For the Chinese, martial art is more than that. It is a master’s philosophy and use of his body to accomplish visual art result.
Success is no accident. Many in the art world just want to follow success and not create it. Great stage works never come from comfort zones. The real risk facing the performing art circles in Hong Kong is the lack of enough top-notch breakthroughs and talented persons, apart from the usual problem: insufficient financial resources to make a big dream possible.
The world has changed. Home cinema, home video game and home audio are the kinds of ‘home entertainment’, because of their instantly accessible enjoyment, are replacing the traditional places like theatres, movie houses and concert halls. Determining what play or dance to go to watch in a theatre can be exorbitant these days, especially when you have to take into account travelling expenses, parking and dinner, apart from the expensive tickets. Making the overall trip ‘worth it’ obviously favours the large budget stage productions these days.
For the above reasons, the new dance drama Wing Chun (詠春), produced by the young city of Shenzhen (深圳) in China, has been extremely popular in the country for more than a year since 2023. The show went to Asian cities. Some said, “What a grand show! Almost 80 dancers perform on stage!” Some said, “The electrifying movements and gravity-defying choreography performed by the dancers create a visual spectacle that keeps us glued to the stage!” Some said, “The variety of striking scenes is another thing that makes me excited. Nobody performs ordinarily!” Some said, “The dancers, male or female, are good-looking, powerful and extremely stunning! They express their performing passion glamorously!”
The story of Ip Man (葉問) who created the famous martial art of Wing Chun (詠春) is well-known among the Chinese. Ip man was born in 1893 and died in 1972. He developed the great martial art of Wing Chun when he was 20. He had a famous legendary student Bruce Lee (李小龍). After the Second World War, Ip left Foshan (佛山) for Hong Kong. The dance performance was chiefly about how he was struggling for a living in Hong Kong, bullied by the gangsters, training his students, sparring with other martial art masters and deserted by his loved wife. His life has an unbroken line of unusual events and emotions, resulting in a successful and yet regretful life.
The production is high-quality but a bit expected. It is said that the investment was fuelled by the Shenzhen government. The stage design, lighting, audiovisual engineering, music and costumes offer their best, though the show are somehow not good enough if it wants to be at the top of other top dances. The truly excellent ones in this case are the dancers. The physically captivating dancers have no stuntman. I can feel that they sometimes risk their bodies to complete dangerous movements. These marvellous performers make the show absurdly beautiful because it is the most rigorous job for a dancer to be equally capable of the best martial art skills at the same time.
The southern island of Baoan (寶安) County became the British Hong Kong after the Opium Wars more than 100 years ago, while the primitive small village of Shenzhen was ignored on the border. In 1979, Shenzhen was suddenly made an Economic Zone for the ambitious economic developments of China. After about 40 years, the young au courant city managed to produce this art show that shocks the Asian art world. Hong Kong has a much longer cultural history and up to now, there has been no such comparable achievement. We should feel downcast by the scale of the threat that we see from this pioneering city neighbour.
The Chief Executive of Hong Kong announced in 2023 that Hong Kong, with the government’s help, will be able to produce big stage shows for large-scale long runs or re-runs. The ‘Signature Performing Arts Programme’ will provide a subsidy of up to Hong Kong $10 million, a matching funding of up to $5 million to match private sector funding and venue support so that these Hong Kong performances can become world-class art productions and the international cultural brand that can represent Hong Kong. This is surely a piece of exciting news. But, the local performing art sectors are too used to government’s money as their major source of funding. How to make profits is right now a big lesson for the local art groups to learn. Money can be a good reason for success. They must realize that there are 10,000 ways that make things not work. Complacency, inertia and lack of business sense are the imminent hurdles that they must overcome.
We all do better when we can gather the most talented people from a larger pool to work together. The population of Hong Kong is just about 7 million. That of Chinese mainland is around 1.41 billion. A top-class performing art team must be made of many gifted artists, from front and back stage. It is almost a necessity that in order to accomplish the ‘signature stage projects’ of Hong Kong, we cannot work alone or simply let a few big stage groups determine the scene. Joint productions of Hong Kong and Chinese mainland will be the sensible path, and I am sure we can find and manage a right path. It is going to take some time, though.
Flexibility is the art of creating way outs within the cul-de-sac, as a Turkish playwright pointed out.
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