Yang Hao: contemporary modern folk

Combining video with live performance, as well as using interior and outdoor locations, Yang demonstrates through movement, the body’s transformative potential—and its limitations.
 
As the title for his latest choreographic work suggests, archetypal folk, modern, and contemporary dance forms are sourced both to recount Yang’s personal history growing up in Mainland China, and to illustrate media accounts of similar experiences by others that have resonated with him.
 
Yang also uses ink and makeup to map his body, only for these marks to be ‘erased’ and revealed again through costume changes at various points during the performance. At other times he responds to the audience through gestures and sounds, and all is set in an environment that evokes a dance studio.
 
The performance ends on a nearby street corner where Yang takes the Japanese avant-garde dance form Butoh—traditionally incorporating white body makeup and slow hyper-controlled movement—as a guide to test how a singular body can engage with the urban landscape to realise its potential as a civic subject.

 

11 October Programme

3pm | AAA Library (in English)
Mapping Asia tour

4pm | A Space and corner of Tai Ping Shan Street & Upper Station Street
contemporary modern folk performance

5pm | AAA Library
Mapping Asia closing reception including light refreshments
 
contemporary modern folk is a new choreographic work by Yang Hao and Alice Rensy.

Yang Hao is a contemporary dancer who was raised in Chongqing, China and is now based in Hong Kong. Yang studied at Song and Dance Arts School in Beijing, China in 1998 and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) in 2007-2009. He has been a dancer for Chinese Opera and Dance Theatre, Guangzhou Song and Dance Troupe; City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC); Guangdong Modern Dance Company; and has toured internationally. Yang has choreographed Autorun (2010); Cube (2013); Nothing… but something (2014); and Out Spoken (2014); often working in collaboration with Alice Rensy. Yang was a resident artist at SIDance festival Dance Exchange (2013) and has received several scholarships and awards.

Mapping Asia is an unfolding publication, exhibition, and programme series presented by Asia Art Archive, that explores multiple vantage points from which to consider Asia, looking beyond inherited boundaries, histories, and political and economic systems to entanglements and connections across time, sites, and geographies.

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