The city's flagship dance company pairs up with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra to celebrate dance, music and literature in a double bill of original homegrown choreography and a show last performed by the Washington Ballet
The Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra (HKPhil)’s resident conductor Lio Kuokman talks excitedly about his “funny-looking” score for his next big show. His annotations vary from his usual concert preparation: scribbled above musical notes and parts are words like “she’s raising her legs”, “look at her right hand”, “wait for her to jump down” or “she’ll move in a big circle”.
While Lio has often worked with dancers over the years, the challenge of this new production is on a different level: the HKPhil and Hong Kong Ballet are collaborating on the Asian premiere of the biggest locally produced show of recent years, Carmina Burana. More than 300 performers—including 50 dancers, three solo singers, 80 adult singers from the HKPhil Chorus, 50 child singers from Hong Kong Children’s Choir and 100 musicians—will come together in a single production this month, the scale of which is a boost to the performing arts scene, especially in the trying times of the pandemic.
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The production is a double bill: the titular piece by Hong Kong Ballet’s artistic director Septime Webre, and The Last Song, choreographer-in-residence Ricky Hu Song Wei’s new work. While in most ballets, the orchestra provides the accompaniment, this production is an equal collaboration between the companies, with Lio responsible for the The Last Song’s music selection and creative process. Hu says that the idea of putting musicians onstage with the dancers was conceived early in the planning of the show. “It’s a city with a people onstage, all in sync and performing together, which is quite inspiring,” Webre adds.
Carmina Burana is a cantata written in the 1930s by German composer Carl Orff, who was inspired by a collection of medieval poems and songs written by monks about fortune, love, lust, gluttony, the arrival of spring, and love that turns bitter. “It certainly raised eyebrows, when the people who were translating those manuscripts, which are both sacred and profane, realised what the monks were up to back in the day,” says Webre.
While Orff’s work has been adapted by different ballet companies over the years, the version to be staged in Hong Kong is the same as Webre’s work for The Washington Ballet (TWB) during his first season as the choreographer there in 2000. Webre saw a performance of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal’s Carmina and was astounded by how passionately the audience received the work. He believed part of what made the show successful was familiarity with the bombastic, energetic score that has found its way into pop culture through horror movies, car commercials and musicals.
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