(Hong Kong, 21^st April 2023) Hot on the heels of the announcement last month of their 2023-24 dance season ‘It’s Summer!’, City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) is now kicking it off with a double-bill performance, Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time & Echo in the Mirror, which will take place at the Auditorium, Kwai Tsing Theatre from 12 to 14 May 2023. Tickets are now on sale at URBTIX, with discounts up to 40% available for advance bookings made from today until 15 May.

For the opening performance of CCDC’s ‘It’s Summer!’ dance season, Terry Tsang and Noel Pong tapped into their personal emotional connections with the city to create choreography that is at once violent and gentle. The double-bill programme presents audiences with an impactful collision of aesthetic styles of two generations, performed by nearly all the artists in the company, including the Associate Artistic Director Dominic Wong.

Noel Pong’s Echo in the Mirror: A Literal and Lyrical Farewell

A Hong Kong native, CCDC’s Artist in Residence, Noel Pong enjoys finding inspiration from everyday life. Her whimsical creative style with a rich narrative and local elements resonates easily with her audiences. Following her previous works Off Screen (2011) and The Buying Game 2.0 (2014), the former a theatrical portrayal of Hong Kong’s film culture and the latter depicting the maze of materialism set in Hong Kong as a “shopping paradise”, Echo in the Mirror centres around the subject of Noel’s departure, transforming its melancholy into a subtle description of the everyday. Replete with her trademark dark humour and artistic style inspired by ordinary life, this piece marks her farewell to the CCDC as she draws the curtain on her decades-long career with the company and moves forward to the next stop in her life.

“I have spent my entire youth here.” Drawing on her memories of the city, Noel weaves all her bitter and sweet moments in Hong Kong and the company into this choreography of intense passion. “People are surprised by how I could work at a place for over 20 years. Of course, there were challenges, but without first tasting the bitter, how would we know how delicious the sweet could be!” In this “swan song” of hers, Noel looks back on her dance career while injecting her creative flair into the ensemble design: a lineup of all the troupe’s female dance artists paired with two male dancers from different generations––Associate Artistic Director Dominic Wong and Dance Artist Trainee Brian Yam, who joined CCDC last year. Echo in the Mirror is a farewell piece that juxtaposes the old and the new, where they interact and shine off one another.

Terry Tsang’s Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time:
A Ritual of Remembrance for the Departed and the Living

The other new creation on the programme, Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time, choreographed by Terry Tsang, explores various profound sentiments on the city’s people and places. “Over the recent years, with the social turmoil in Hong Kong and during Covid, the city has seen countless departures, both of the living and the dead. I hope the work can be a form of spiritual therapy for the audiences, and more importantly, guide them in facing future Hong Kong and their future selves.”

Since leaving CCDC in 2019, Terry has released several choreographic works, ranging from dance, visual art to performance arts, with a bold and avant-garde style. At the Hong Kong Dance Awards 2023, he was the award winnder for the “Tom Brown Emerging Choreographer Award”. Building on his signature themes of desire and taboo, Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time transforms the ritual of “hell-door-breaking” into dance, in an all-revealing rendition that delivers an impactful experience for the audience’s body, mind and soul, through his distinctive aesthetic and keen perception of dance and visual art. The idea of incorporating the traditional Canton ritual stems from Terry’s childhood memories and carries a profound wish, “Besides mourning the dead, the most important function of rituals is to heal the wounded and weary souls of the living, including those of audiences in Hong Kong. On entering the theatre, they are transported to a different time and space, as though having escaped reality while experiencing a quasi-imaginary funeral ritual.”

Travel of Soul Time AFTER Time & Echo in the Mirror is a tribute to the city, in keeping with the company’s ethos of “Made in Hong Kong, Made for Hong Kong”. The 2023-24 dance season ‘It’s Summer!’ will start from the soil of our city, taking you on a soul-stirring exploration of the spirit of dance.

About City Contemporary Dance Company

City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC), the flagship of contemporary dance in Hong Kong, undertakes to blaze the path of contemporary dance scene with extraordinary performances representing contemporary Hong Kong culture. Founded by Willy Tsao in 1979 and directed by Yuri Ng since 2021, CCDC has presented more than 200 highly-acclaimed original works by leading choreographers and innovative collaborations with artists across various media. City Contemporary Dance Festival has pioneered in Asia to reimagine the possibilities of modern dance. It is renowned for translating the vigour and creativity of Hong Kong’s multifaceted culture. Since 1980, the Company has accepted 273 overseas performance invitations to represent Hong Kong at the world’s foremost dance stages and festivals. It is regarded as “the artistic soul of contemporary Hong Kong”.

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