The Hong Kong Ballet’s Way to Cultural Industries?

Throughout 2017, one needed not to be a regular ballet-goer to be once amazed by the Hong Kong Ballet’s promotional campaign in the form of MTR lightbox advertisements and huge posters in public spaces. Flipping through the Hong Kong Ballet’s Annual Report 2017/18, we get a glimpse of some of the images used in the posters; stylish with vibrant colours, and they highlight the contrast and fusion of graceful bodies and the local cityscape. The cityscape itself as the backdrop highlights ‘characteristics’ such as ‘the East meeting the West’, ‘blending of the traditional and the modern’, that are strongly orientalist, exotic, almost cliché (Plate 1). For Hong Kong, a commercial city that is particular to publicity and packaging with world-class designs, the images used in the Hong Kong Ballet’s new campaign were somewhat mediocre. But if we dial back the clock to 2013/14 and compare the styling in 2013/14 and 2017/18 Annual Reports, it becomes obvious that the ‘ugly duckling’ had changed its skin in just four years. Gone was the humble appearance, and she is now quite a looker.