Colours leap off the canvas and pale into significance on stage
Turning brushstrokes on canvas into movements in space fascinates Hong Kong's reigning queen of choreography, Helen Lai, of the City Contemporary Dance Company. In an earlier work, Frida, Lai took five paintings by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and translated them into a ravishing dance piece that evoked the artist's extraordinary life.
Kahlo's paintings are naive and easy to read, far removed from the abstract technicolour works of Hong Kong artist Yank Wong Yan-kwai, whose paintings are the starting point for Lai's new dance piece, Colour Fugue.
Wong's paintings swirl with bright, hard acrylic paint, primary reds, yellows, blues and greens jostling in a hectic visual marketplace with titles such as Broken White and Sardine Blue. Turning these paintings into dance might conjure images of athletic bodies ricocheting off each other like coloured beads on a nursery abacus. Yet the dancers will be dressed in white.
Independently, both Lai and Wong react scornfully to any suggestion that colour can have meaning. The suggestion that red could represent energy and blue spirituality is anathema to them. 'I'm not interested in that kind of interpretation of colour,' Lai says. 'That's far too simplistic.' The aim is not to look at colour, Wong says, but to think about colour. 'Not using colour in the performance is quite conceptual. White is also a colour, so you can't escape colour even though it apparently isn't there.'
Lai is interested in 'the relationships between colours that create movement'.
'In the first section of the dance I'm trying to use the dancers' bodies in space as an artist would use oil on canvas - a dancer's movement equivalent to an artist's brushstroke.'
Asked to sum up Wong's work in three adjectives Lai doesn't hesitate: 'vibrant, restless, active'. And in those words lie the seeds of her new work.
Lai isn't a choreographer who marches into rehearsal with her dance carefully notated in a loose-leaf folder. She began the process of creating Colour Fugue by standing her dancers in front of Wong's painting, Broken White.
'My dancers were not familiar with his paintings,' she says. 'After looking at Broken White I asked them to improvise to show what they got from it. But they all did things so differently it was difficult to put anything coherent together. Some responded to the painting as a whole, others focused on details, some were abstract, others interpreted symbols. One said, 'Breaking White is about breaking taboos and I've always wanted to dance with my clothes off' - but perhaps it's a bit soon for that.'
Lai has created dance out of literature such as Kafka's Metamorphosis. 'It's easier when it's a book because you can play with the plot. But working with Yank's paintings is more elusive.'
She seems to respond to the poetry of the paintings' titles almost as much as the works themselves. 'The moment I heard the title Broken White I liked it,' she says. 'Such a strong, evocative title full of action and colour.'
Lai has also responded in a literary way to the Chinese word for 'colour'. The Chinese title for Colour Fugue translates as 'chasing colour'. 'I played around with the idea of chasing colour. The Chinese character for colour can also mean 'sex' and 'external reality'. Chinese speakers will understand this. But representing what's behind visible reality is difficult because dance is about what you see. There are so many layers of meaning - so much freedom - it's difficult to decide what I want to do.'
Colour Fugue, by City Contemporary Dance Company, April 8-9, 8pm, Auditorium, Kwai Tsing Theatre, $120-$500 Urbtix. Inquiries: 2734 9009
