Hong Kong Dance Company’s impressive revival of Helen Lai’s HerStory

Following the success of its staging of Helen Lai’s 1991 masterpiece Nine Songs two years ago, the Hong Kong Dance Company has revived another of the choreographer’s works, HerStory.

Although not on a par with Lai’s greatest works, such as Nine Songs, The Rite of Spring, The Comedy of K and Testimony, HerStory certainly deserves to be seen again: the themes are thought-provoking, the choreography outstanding and it was performed superbly by the entire cast.

First staged in 2007 for the City Contemporary Dance Company, HerStory was inspired by a unique writing system developed by the women of Jiangyong county, in mainland China’s Hunan Province, a secret code through which they could express themselves and communicate with each other without the knowledge of men.

Known as nüshu (HerStory’s Chinese title), this centuries-old system literally translates as “women’s writing”. Lai takes it as a starting point to explore not only the original phenomenon but women’s writing and self-expression in a wider sense, along with the challenges of living in a male-dominated world.

The opening section vividly evokes the hidden world of the women who devised nüshu 400 years ago. Seven barefoot female dancers in white costumes portray, in stylised, pared-down fashion, their relationships and the experiences of life in their village, such as marriage – symbolised by the clever use of red bridal veils – childbirth, grief and parting.

Fans, so often a cliché in Chinese dance, are deployed here with dazzling ingenuity and inventiveness to express an astonishing range of emotions.

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In complete contrast, the second section takes us to modern times where the women, now wearing chic black dresses and high heels, are joined by their male counterparts.

Lai shows her sense of humour with some sharply observed vignettes of how women are treated by – and behave in relation to – men. Charles Aznavour’s paean to womankind, She, becomes an ironic soundtrack in the scene where women are being (quite literally) manipulated by their male partners.

Male domination and female compliance are even more explicit when the song She’s a Lady (in a recording by lesbian jazz singer Patricia Barber) comes on.

In a powerful sequence set to Damien Rice’s raw, provocative Woman Like a Man, the women, now in black trouser suits, circle among the men, giving them aggressive looks.

Tension mounts and finally boils over as one by one the female dancers tear off their jackets and dance wildly, culminating in an electrifying, frenzied solo by He Yongning. It’s as if we’re being asked: do women have to become like men to achieve independence and is the price too high to pay? Or is such a definition of gender in itself just another trap?

After the anger and bitterness comes an extraordinary moment of serenity, a duet where a woman and a man express profound tenderness and love through movements of breathtaking simplicity – no big lifts, no gymnastics, just pure emotion.

Performed beautifully by Huang Wenjie and Ong Tze Shen, it was deeply moving and, even though the woman walks away at the end, gave the feeling that perhaps there is hope after all.

Returning to the white-clad nüshu women, hundreds of pages representing their writings litter the stage. They look through them, react with joy or sadness to what they read, play with them, or tear them up.

The piece ends with a fire – a real fire, a bold move on stage – consuming the writing. This has a certain ritual quality and presumably refers to how nüshu writings were often destroyed after the woman who wrote them died, but watching dancers groping through piles of paper does not make for a strong ending.

HerStory may not form an organic whole. While both the first and second sections are excellent, they are so different from each other in style and approach that they feel like two separate works.

Nonetheless, there is much to admire and I felt it had more impact this time than in 2007.

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Lai’s choreography shows her ability to generate emotion, her mastery of groupings and the use of space, her unrivalled skill in making use of chairs (or in this case stools), and the consummate musicality that enables her to respond with equal empathy to a splendidly eclectic range of music, from Tuvan throat singing to Besame Mucho.

The dancers perform with feeling and a sense of freedom – dancing this work with its varied choreography is a voyage of discovery for them – and the Hong Kong Dance Company is to be congratulated on a fine production and on building an ongoing partnership with Lai, Hong Kong’s most iconic choreographer.

“Hong Kong Dance Company and Helen Lai: HerStory”, The Box, Freespace, West Kowloon Cultural District. Reviewed: December 15.