The City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) was awarded ‘Outstanding Services to Dance’ at the 22nd Hong Kong Dance Awards for its ‘Research Project — Oral History of Hong Kong Dance Development’ (Research Project) in 2020. The award statement reads as follows:

Researchers Lee Hoi-yin Joanna and Lam Heyee spent almost two years conducting, transcribing and analysing interviews in Hong Kong, the US and Canada with ten pioneers of local dance. The book The Unspoken Dance: An Oral History of Hong Kong Dance (1950s–70s) is an invaluable record of the cultural history of Hong Kong dance, preserving the recollections and observations of these key contributors to the development of dance as an art form in our city and inspiring our empathy and understanding for their achievements.

As the statement says, everyone involved has devoted a great deal of time and effort to executing the project, the beginnings of which can be traced back to the ‘Contestable Funding Pilot Scheme for the Major Performing Arts Groups’ initiated by the Home Affairs Bureau in 2015. Finally, in 2018, The Unspoken Dance: An Oral History of Hong Kong Dance (1950s–70s) (The Unspoken Dance) was published and a dedicated website built by the CCDC for the project (the Website) was launched.

In Chinese, 跨 (kua, to cross) means to move or cross over by raising one’s foot; 界 (jie, border) is the boundary between things or realms of concepts or disciplines such as professions and genders. Therefore, when these characters combine to form the Chinese vocabulary of 跨界 (kuajie), it means moving between different fields or interdisciplinary that involves two or more different subjects or areas of knowledge. According to the definition by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), ‘The performing arts range from vocal and instrumental music, dance and theatre to pantomime, sung verse and beyond. They include numerous cultural expressions that reflect human creativity and that are also found, to some extent, in many other intangible cultural heritage domains.’

Hong Kong has seen more community dance and community participatory dance projects in recent years. In the 2019 Community Cultural Ambassador Scheme, five out of twenty performing arts projects came with dance elements, liberating the definition of dance and enriching the social significance of dance creations. However, little attention has been given to their values, practices, aesthetics, and dimensions of assessment. This essay strives to evaluate three community dance and community participatory dance projects as well as one cross-district cultural exchange scheme under the framework of ‘arts as social practice’. The discussion of these four projects in 2019 will be translated into four dimensions for assessment — spatial quality, aesthetic experience, horizontal learning, and structural changes.

When it comes to research in theatre works, there are sizable research/ resource centres of performing arts in Europe and Asia, including the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The Paris-based CNRS has been setting up research centres with collaborators from various universities and publishing theatre practitioners’ research works on performing arts, producing a special collection of important reference books for the up-and-coming generation and researchers from all over the world. There are different research institutes affiliated with the CASS, based in Beijing, each conducting research on topics of their concern. The Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies under the CASS, for example, adopts methodologies in folklore studies/folkloristics and anthropology, leaving a valuable legacy for Asian performing arts. In addition to the national-sized institutions, the Vlaams Theater Instituut (VTi)[1] in Belgium is one of the institutes that have enjoyed a high profile recently. Their research outcomes and publications provide a huge amount of information and data on their core artists and performing arts groups, and as a result, the database of the theatre plays and experimental dance works that they promote have enlightened the audience and readers about the vibrant art scene in Flanders and the world-famous ‘Flanders art phenomenon’.

In the 1960s, as an immense Hispanic population poured into the United States, these immigrants and their descendants gradually developed a culture of their own to vent their suffering as they led lives of oppression and marginalisation. Hence in the 1970s, a unique dance culture began on the two coasts of the United States. Marginalised, their dance was not accepted in the respected circles and could only take place on the streets, and so was called ‘street dance’. There are many different forms of street dance, such as Breaking, Hip Hop, Locking, Popping, and House. As a means of emotional release, these dances always imply indignation, anti-mainstream, and anti-establishment. Another characteristic of street dance is its combative nature. Called ‘Battle’ or ‘Cypher’, these dance competitions allow combatants to challenge each other as a way to amuse and entertain.

The year 1986 was an important year in the arts—it marked the launch of the inaugural Hong Kong Festival of Arts with the Disabled, and the establishment of the Arts with the Disabled Association Hong Kong (ADAHK). More than three decades have passed since. Disability arts have come a long way in this city. While they were once perceived as a kind of social welfare activity in the early years, over time they have received positive attention in mainstream arts circles. The ADAHK was recognised for its artistic achievement when it garnered the status of being financially supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC). The association went on to win accolades at the annual HKADC’s Hong Kong Arts Development Awards, including a Bronze prize and a Gold prize in Award for Arts Education in 2009 and 2012 respectively, and a Bronze prize in the Award for Arts Promotion in 2012. There have also been many notable efforts from other organisations striving and thriving along this path. They include productions by the Hong Kong Theatre of the Deaf and the Theatre of the Silence, featuring artists with hearing impairments; and Waiting for Ming Kwong performed by actors with visual impairments. Other impressive productions have included Concert in the Dark, and the experiential exhibition Dialogue in the Dark, which opened in 2010. The Health, Welfare and Food Bureau (predecessor of the Food and Health Bureau) of the HKSAR Government and the ADAHK co-presented the International Festival of Inclusive Arts in 2006. The wheelchair dance at the 2007 Congress of the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association in Hong Kong received wide acclaim. Established in 2011, the GIA theatre (Glow in Art) has presented an array of theatrical productions featuring performers both with and without disabilities. The Nonsensemakers launched The Hand in Hand Capable Theatre, which has been active in staging inclusive performances in recent years. Its production, The Rainbow Troops, was one of the programmes of the 2017 Jockey Club Hand in Hand Capable Theatre IncluDrama Project. These developments reflect growing recognition of the arts as a means for overcoming barriers and achieving (or at least striving for) social inclusion. We seek to experience the differences between people from diverse perspectives and reflect on the meaning of “handicap” at a deeper level—the emotional handicap of those who discriminate against others may be the worst handicap of all. All this fosters our understanding of and respect for “the other”, inspiring us to work together to build a better society.

In recent years, the genre of “oral history theatre” has become more familiar to the local community. In particular the Chung Ying Theatre Company (Chung Ying) has put a lot of effort into presenting works of this genre. I had always wanted to watch this type of drama. Over two years ago, in a discussion with Chung Ying about research studies, I learnt that they were applying to the Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) for funding of a three-year programme on oral history theatre, and that they planned to conduct a research project as part of the programme. Without a second thought, we decided to include efficacy evaluation in the programme proposal, which also fulfilled the requirements of the HKJC.

The famous American writer Mark Twain once said: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” We are likely to feel this way when looking back at the local social and political chaos in Hong Kong in recent years. The people and things we see on social media and in the news are often stranger and more intriguing than the stories presented on theatre stages. Also, there has been a steady increase in Hong Kong people’s curiosity about and exploration of local history since the handover. In recent years, theatrical works based on or inspired by real stories have grown in number, and those in which lead roles are performed by “amateurs” have begun to appear.

At the end of 2018, Theatre Horizon broadcasted the awards ceremony of the New Directors’ Movement on Facebook live. Chan Chu-hei, the mastermind behind the New Directors’ Movement and the MC of the event, took the opportunity to explain that the programme could be better understood as a “movement”, not as a mere “project”.1 Delivered in a casual tone, Chan’s remark was nevertheless a reaffirmation of a manifesto. A movement, as we know it, is devoted to a cause—it unites people who share the same vision and advocate for it, or who seek to create change in the world. Indeed, it is more imaginative and inspiring to call it a movement rather than a project.

Hong Kong has undergone rapid changes in many respects since the 1997 handover, and the year 2014 saw its largest and longest-running social movement in nearly half a century. With participants on all sides, the movement affected people in every walk of life in all of Hong Kong, and naturally had an impact on the performing arts. One of the functions of theatre is to reflect and examine social reality. The build-up of changes in Hong Kong’s situation and the explosions in recent years have galvanised many theatre makers to portray and respond to these events in a variety of ways. Many performances in 2017 and 2018 are related to this. Perhaps some of such relationships are not a direct result of the said events in society, but they stem from the imagination fired in the creators. A close look at the performances in those two years, then, reveals the ways in which local works have developed through the borrowing of foreign texts or aesthetic forms or engaged in various kinds of exploration on the basis of local aesthetics. Such exploration includes formal or aesthetic responses involving text, stage design, sound effects and space.