Grand Original Dance Poem

Shan Shui: An Ode To Nature (Re-run)

A Waltz of Nature’s Timeless Charm

Shan Shui: An Ode to Nature will be staged again from 14 to 16 October 2022 at Lyric Theatre, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Premiered in 2021 as Hong Kong Dance Company’s opening performance for its 40th anniversary dance season, the show has won wide acclaim and was selected as one of ISPA 2022’s Pitch New Works projects.

Shan Shui (landscape) paintings are an important vehicle for art and philosophy in traditional Chinese culture. Through depicting the external environment, artists give expression to the internal human world, revealing the relationship between man and nature.

Sense the power of nature through the body

Hong Kong Dance Company’s Artistic Director draws on the image of nature under the brush, painting an inner world beyond the confines of time or space through dance. The dancers’ bodies become the brush’s dots, dashes and vigorous strokes; they are the artist’s eye for rhyme, rhythm and internal beauty. The Company’s three-year research study on Chinese Martial Arts and Chinese Dance has brought elements of Chinese martial arts into dance training, constructed a richer texture of dance and taken the dance performance in Shan Shui to another level.

“Shan Shui: An Ode to Nature reveals a unique sense of vitality and tranquility. It demonstrates a dance aesthetics that embodies elements of traditional Chinese paintings and martial arts, in powerful compositional flow and rhythm.” Said Dr. Elaine Chan, film and cultural studies scholar (extracted from Master Insight Media)

Sense the power of nature through the body, take in worldly beauty and meditate on the origins of life. Pass through mountains and over waters, and with a full heart, let the limits of the self and the physical world dissolve.

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Programme Plus ____________________________________________________

Meet the Artists ____________________________________________________

15.10. 2022 (Sat)｜3pm To be held after the Matinee performance. For ticket holders of this performance only.

Performance information ____________________________________________________

Age Limit : 6 (Person below this age not admitted) HKDC reserves the right to change the programe and substitute artists  

Creative Team ______________________________________________________

Director & Choreographer: Yang Yuntao

Composer & Music Director: Paul Yip

Set & Costume Designer: Tsang Man-tung

Lighting Designer: Gabriel Fung

Digital Image Designer: Oliver Shing

Sound Designer: Anthony Yeung

Live Music Performance : Wan Xing

Mr Yang Yuntao (Artistic Director of Hong Kong Dance Company)

Winner of two Hong Kong Dance Awards in 2003 and 2006 for his outstanding dance performance, and awarded Best Artist (Dance) at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards 2009, Yang Yuntao is an accomplished dancer and choreographer. He joined the Hong Kong Dance Company (HKDC) in 2002 as Principal Dancer. He was the company’s Assistant Artistic Director from 2007 and has been its Artistic Director since November 2013.

Yang has choreographed for various dance companies. His award-winning choreography credits for HKDC include: Spring Ritual · Eulogy, winner of Outstanding Achievement in Production at the 2013 Hong Kong Dance Awards and presented in Beijing and Taipei in 2013; The Legend of Mulan, winner of Outstanding Production and Outstanding Ensemble Performance at the 2014 Hong Kong Dance Awards and presented in New York and Sydney in 2015, London in 2017 and Minsk in 2019; Storm Clouds, winner of three awards at the 2015 Hong Kong Dance Awards; and L’Amour Immortel, winner of three awards at the 2016 Hong Kong Dance Awards and presented in Beijing, Guangzhou, Taipei, Shanghai and Hangzhou from 2017 to 2019. His other works for HKDC include The Butterfly Lovers (presented in Seoul in 2016), Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Voices and Dances of the Distant Land, Blanc in Reveries of the Red Chamber, Chinese Hero: A Lone Exile, In the Beginning in Vipassana, Lady White of West Lake, Waiting Heart, Dance of Strings, A Tale of the Southern Sky and Convergence, a culminating work created through a three-year interdisciplinary research study on Chinese dance and Chinese martial arts traditions.

Mr Tsang Man-tung (Set & Costume Designer)

Tsang Man-tung was a special research fellow at the Yale School of Drama in 2010/11. Renowned for his conceptual and minimalist style, his ritual theatre works include The Heart Sutra and Hong Kong Dance Company Vipassana.

Tsang has received numerous awards, including Best Set Design, Best Costume Design and Best Make-up and Image Design at the Hong Kong Drama Awards and Award for Best Artist (Theatre) (2007/08) at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. Tsang was a three-time winner at the Hong Kong Dance Award for Outstanding Set Design for Dance (2012, 2016 & 2017). In addition, he was among the awardees in the “Secretary for Home Affairs’ Commendation Scheme” in 2015 for his contribution to the development of arts and culture. He received the Silver prize for Set Design at the World Stage Design 2017 for his work Storm Clouds this year.

An accomplished musician, Tsang is an expert on meditation through singing bowls, having performed many times around the world. Tsang has released his first album The Seed of Sound in 2018.