Sang Jijia, the new artistic director of City Contemporary Dance Company, is set to open the group’s new season next month

The strong line-up of overseas choreographers is a decision rooted in Sang Jijia’s hope to expose the city’s dancers and choreographers to more dance influences. “The problem with Hong Kong’s dance industry is that most dancers only started training professionally when they start university,” he says, meaning they are not as physically flexible as and lack the foundation of dancers from mainland China and Taiwan, who start training at primary school age.

Sang Jijia started his professional training at the age of 13—although not by choice. In the 1980s, the Minzu University of China in Beijing recruited dance students from different ethnic regions: Dongbei, Jiling, Yunnan, Gangsu, Qinghai and Tibet. “It was considered a great opportunity among ethnic groups, as it would mean a chance to live and work in a big city like Beijing,” he recalls. “One day, some examiners from the university came to my hometown. They picked out all the children who were 11 or 12, measured us and asked if we were interested in dancing.”

Sang Jijia demonstrated huge potential, so was chosen to study in Beijing. “I had no training at all, and I didn’t know how to write a single Han word then,” he says with a chuckle. “But I worked very hard and caught up with students who already had basic dance skills.” He so impressed the school that in 1992, a year before graduation, he was given a place at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. “It was a very rare chance, because usually you’d have to go through a tough examination to enter any university. They already paved my way to become the next dance expert and advocate.”

The previous year, Sang Jijia had participated in a showcase of contemporary dance put on by the Guangdong Dance Academy at a national competition. “That was my first time learning about contemporary dance. I was used to ethnic Chinese dances, which have a strict set of styles and rules, like how in Mongolian dance, you must extend your back and breathe a certain way. My teachers would correct me if I didn’t follow the rules, and that exasperated me sometimes,” he says. “I was fascinated by how, in contemporary dance, we could move in whatever way we like.”

The experience transformed his understanding of the craft. “Contemporary dance is an expression of and experimentation with your body, and it reflects social and personal changes in different periods of time,” he says. In 1993, without finishing the course or graduating, he quit Minzu, forfeited his place at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and joined the GMDC. He had made a lasting impression members of the company who had witnessed his performance two years earlier, and been in touch with the artistic director ever since. From then until 1998, he trained under GMDC founder Willy Tsao, who offered him the freedom to choreograph some pieces. “The best part about being in this company was that it had its own theatre with a 12 x 12m stage and seats for 120 audience members. You could create shows that would [be staged at] cultural centres or theatres in [other places],” he says. “Every weekend, we put on productions with original, experimental choreography.”

In 1998 and 1999, Sang Jijia received scholarships from the Asian Cultural Council Scholarship to study dancing in New York; and in 2002 became the first Asian to be selected for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative to study choreography under Forsythe in Germany. “William had a huge impact on me. He brought contemporary dance to a different level: he doesn’t only look at body movements but the dancers’ state of mind and current dance trends,” he says.

These two experiences in the west added to his international exposure and influenced his work when he returned to China in 2006. His pioneering productions since then challenge the formats of dance and the relationship between dancers and the space. For example, in Stream of Dust (2023), dancers swept up soil, creating currents of dusts that mirrored the dancers’ inner state of mind. In the 2023 re-run of Meeting In-Between Time (2022), he staged the site-specific show outside the historic Pokfulam Dairy Farm at sunset; the changing light, the dancers’ shadows and a video projected onto the walls of the heritage building combined to create a metaphoric crossroads between past and present.

“I constantly ask myself: how can we make dance even more dimensional and diverse? Where and how far can the dance arts go?” he says. “Contemporary dance shouldn’t only belong to the theatre—it’s meant to be [done where it can] create bigger creative impacts: it can be the museum, gallery or street.

The choreographer recently returned to his roots in traditional dance when he was invited by famed Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou to serve as artistic director for Macau 2024, a production at Macau’s MGM Theatre that combined Chinese and Mongolian arts, such as the Miao, Yi and Mongolian people’s traditional singing and dancing, and state-of-the-art technology, including dancing robots and remote-controlled flying balloon animals.

Don’t miss: How filmmaker Zhang Yimou is revitalising Chinese traditional arts in ‘Macau 2049’

“Existing shows that promote cultural heritage usually put only one kind of ethnic dance onstage, and that’s it. But there is still a gap between the audience sitting in the present and these heritage elements from the past,” he says. “The show is more forward-thinking and ‘alive’ than I anticipated. It poses a timely question: where do humans and the creative arts stand in the age of AI and technology?”

With his new role, Sang Jijia wants to take local contemporary dance to the next level. As well as exposing local artists to different styles, schools and companies outside Hong Kong, he will continue CCDC’s efforts to make dance more widely available to the public. CCDC has been offering workshops and classes for all ages since 1979—some students who take part in such training after watching performances go on to become professional dancers with the company.

“As Hong Kong’s earliest contemporary dance company, we have the responsibility to show more Hongkongers that dance can be a career and essentially make them fall in love with dance,” he says. “I’m proud to see that many professional contemporary dancers in the city were trained by us.”

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