Review | Craft beer lubricates audience for Hong Kong contemporary dance show

As if an “immersive” landscape, “mesmerising” sound effects and “video mapping” aren’t enough of a draw, the City Contemporary Dance Company has thrown in local craft beer as an extra sensory stimulation for people who watch its show Meeting In-Between Time at a Hong Kong heritage site.

Choreographer Sang Jijia’s site-specific creation could easily have been overwhelmed by gimmickry. Yet all the elements complement each other beautifully in this pensive and poetic production.

The venue, renamed “The Pokfulam Farm” for the show, is a 135-year-old building that housed the staff quarters of Dairy Farm; there is open space on the site and a separate, glass-fronted function room. Just outside the gates of Béthanie, a former French Mission sanatorium, it recently reopened as a centre for the history and culture of Pok Fu Lam.

With the temperature still hovering around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) at 6pm, ticket holders on the show’s opening weekend who bought the “Local Brewery Package” were quick to claim their can of ice-cold beer before the show began.

There was no seating, and so the crowd milled around the grassy areas outside, with a giant rabbit lantern and a fake cow providing a comic and slightly surreal backdrop.

A hush descended when two dancers, Eric Kwong and Simpson Yau, quietly emerged from the crowd, their heads touching, their arms linked. They began an elegant and intimate duet of gentle sparring and twirls, their bodies always connected, as if they had been starved of physical contact and could not bear to pull apart.