FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.


Standing still as the future dances past
Dance show explores the relentless pace of Hong Kong living
by Nikki Sheppy

Relentless
choreographed by Nicole Mion
March 25 - 29
The Big Secret Theatre

As Hong Kong moves towards repatriation, 33-year-old choreographer Nicole Mion is tapping into the city's energy for her upcoming dance production, Relentless. Co-sponsored by Canada Council and Foreign Affairs, Relentless is a taut 50-minute, five-dancer exploration of memory, risk and noise pollution in one of Asia's most contentious properties.

Last fall, Mion spent four months in Hong Kong, witnessing everything from the city's breakneck pace to its legendary passion for gambling. Intrigued, she decided to take a look at just what such a change meant to the people.

"It was very interesting being there this last year," says Mion. "So much of the work I saw by Hong Kong artists was related to the past - to memory and reminiscing."

Mion doesn't think it's a coincidence - far from it.

"It's fascinating in a place like Hong Kong where there has been very little care for the past," she explains. "Land values are so high that you destroy everything. There are no old buildings. Nothing's older than 30 years. Hong Kong is really about the future.... So an idea that kept recurring for me was the fact that in a time when you can't imagine the future, you think about the past."

Relentless also deals with speed and slowness, she says. In fact, speed is perhaps the most obvious thing about Hong Kong. The city is virtually teeming with noise and activity. Energy literally sweeps over you.

But what's more interesting, says Mion, is that speed and slowness are intimately related with memory and forgetting. Influenced by the Milan Kundera novel, Slowness, which she read while in Hong Kong, Mion speculates on what pace might mean for the people of Hong Kong.

"I think that when we want to forget, we speed up, and when we want to remember, we slow down," she says, pointing to Hong Kong's tradition of speed and its new desire, in the face of uncertainty, to decelerate. "At one point in Slowness, two women are walking on a road and one of them starts to slow down to remember something. Then the other one starts to remember and speeds up."

According to Mion, the physical environment of the city also influenced how she structured Relentless.

"A lot of my work as a choreographer relates to space. And as Albertans, we live in a place where you can look across the plains and see forever. It's very horizontal. It's open. And I think that colors how we think and how we create."

"Hong Kong," she says, "is the antithesis of that. Everything is piled on top of itself.... There's always sound and people bombarding you. Not intentionally, but it's always there."

That all-pervasive sense of noise pollution is what convinced Mion to set Relentless to a score made up of music by Tricky and Tuvan throat music.

"Tricky really captures the feeling of Hong Kong," says Mion. "All the different energy, the unease, (the fact that there's) more than one thing happening." The Tuvan throat music is Mongolian in origin, adding an Oriental dimension to the sound.

Combining hand-drawn film footage and text with music and movement, Relentless is steadfastly focussed on one impending moment in history.

Ultimately, says Mion, like any profound change, the handover to China spawns anxiety. For the moment, while the citizens of Hong Kong wait for the approaching day, it's business more or less as usual. But in the joss sticks, the fortune-telling, and the daily risk of investment in Hong Kong's biggest game -- money -- lies a key to its identity.

"Gambling," says Mion, "is an important part of their culture. Something like $1500 Canadian per capita is spent on it. And I think in this case, Hong Kong is gambling with their future, with who they are."

Relentless is presented in honor of Canada's Year of the Asian Pacific. It will be paired with one of Mion's favorite works, dating from 1995 - And Your Body Has the Muscle of Birds and the Desire of their Wings, featuring Decidedly Jazz's Hannah Stilwell and Alberta Ballet's Walter Wittich.

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