Cover Carmina Burana (Image: courtesy of Hong Kong Ballet)

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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Above Carmina Burana (Image: courtesy of Hong Kong Ballet)

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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Above Ricky Hu Song Wei (left) and Septime Webre (Photo: courtesy of Hong Kong Ballet)

On his return flight to Washington, he was reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, a fantastical tale in which a woman from Elizabethan England ceases to age until she falls in love in the 1920s, and decided to add elements of the story to his Carmina. “It’s a beautiful story about the cycle of life and the endless search for love over the course of hundreds of years,” Webre says.

The result was a visually stunning dance piece. He wove together materials from the medieval text, Orff’s music, Woolf’s words and other canonical art that explores humanity’s search for love across history. Dancers move in circles inside a ring of 8-metre-tall metal scaffolding created by Cirque du Soleil designer Liz Vandal—the overall effect is reminiscent of a medieval monastery filled with berobed monks—while the singers’ voices roar and ring.

Then, a dancer in the posture of Da Vinci’s famous sketch The Vitruvian Man stands on a giant ring to reference the “wheel of fortune” and Da Vinci’s anatomical understanding of humanity. “Da Vinci’s belief epitomises early Renaissance rationalism, which broke the mould of the chaotic medieval world of the monks and is an interesting juxtaposition,” Webre explains.

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Above Esmiana Jani in a costume inspired by Marie Antoinette in The Washington Ballet’s Carmina Burana (Photo: courtesy of Theo Kossenas/Media 4 Artists)

Fast-forward to 2017, when Webre left TWB to take up the role as the Hong Kong Ballet’s artistic director and reviewed what the local repertoire was missing. Over the past five years, he has staged and brought a diverse range of works to Hong Kong, which includes classics such as The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, as well as original pieces such as The Great Gatsby and Romeo + Juliet. But the seasoned choreographer decided the line-up was still not complete. Last year, when Webre had a meeting with Lio on a new collaboration, the choreographer suggested that Carmina, which he describes as an “unusual production”, was the missing piece. Lio immediately felt that it was the right choice for a collaborative production.

But Webre wanted to do more than revive a work: as well as designing even more technically challenging choreography for the Hong Kong dancers than their Washington counterparts, he called in Lio and Hu to create a complementary work. Their efforts resulted in The Last Song. They started with the music. Lio settled on Bach: “Why don’t we come back to another German composer for a sound experience that contrasts with Orff?” Performed by a chamber orchestra of about 30 musicians onstage, Bach’s composition is pure and intimate, whereas Orff’s score, played by an orchestra of 67 in the usual pit, is more powerful.

The conductor says this collaboration is both a challenge and a fun experience: usually in an opera or ballet, the conductor and orchestra follow a set score. “This time, although I’m not composing the music, I get to select and arrange the order of Bach’s pieces,” says Lio, enhancing the storytelling effect of the music.

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Above Sona Kharatian and Gian Carlo Perez in The Washington Ballet’s Carmina Burana in 2016 (Photo: courtesy of Theo Kossenas/Media 4 Artists)

Based on the music, Hu came up with the story and choreography, a stylistically minimalistic piece that dives deep into emotional expressions, contrasting with the “overpowering visual impact” of Webre’s piece. The Last Song is based on Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale The Nightingale and the Rose, which tells of a student’s failure to woo a girl who demands a red rose from him; how, pitying him, a nightingale sacrifices herself by piercing her breast so that her blood causes the desired flower to grow; and how the girl rejects the student with the red rose as she has a new, richer suitor.

Hu’s dance piece is a restrained take on Wilde’s story that digs deeper into its symbolism. Among the 32 dancers in simple coloured costumes, a few dance the role of the boy, who represents Wilde; the nightingale represents Wilde’s ego, true feelings and gifts, which he gave away in return for reputation, symbolised by the rose. Hu says his interpretation of this fable through his dance piece is slightly different from the original: “Because what Wilde gave away wasn’t valued by people around him, he never ended up getting what he desired.” In a way, this isn’t far from Webre’s piece, with its theme of humanity’s search for its desires. As Webre puts it, “It’s about that which we are seeking to attain but never quite attain. Perhaps we get it in our lives or we reach it in death, Nirvana or the afterlife. It’s about the journey of our lives.”

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Above Lio Kuokman (Photo: courtesy of Ka Lam)

Webre describes Woolf and Wilde as “both wry observers of the world around them”—seekers of an understanding of the human condition, an element that Webre, Lio and Hu hope audiences will recognise in their production. Webre believes that, no matter how far removed the contexts of Orff, Bach, Da Vinci, Wilde and Woolf may be from Hong Kong, “The journey that we’re all on in this search is unique but also the same, and this sense that life is about the journey is common to all of us.”

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