Edmund Lee meets the up-and-coming choreographers behind Happily N’ever After

You’d be forgiven for missing the connections between the two new works in Happily N’ever After, the modern-dance double bill to kickstart City Contemporary Dance Company’s 2010 season. There apparently is none. “Once we knew that we’re doing this show,” says Noel Pong on sharing the billing with fellow dancer-choreographer Dominic Wong, “we stopped discussing with each other. We brainstormed alone, and naturally came up with two very different works.” Wong adds, playfully, “Otherwise, the audience may complain that they’re watching one show [instead of a double bill].”

While the two rising stars’ new creations are not designed to fit into one performance (“We haven’t really considered the feelings of our marketing colleagues,” Pong jokingly remarks, “they must have had a hard time figuring out how to bring the two titles together”), the occasion for such a collaboration seems only natural for all concerned. After all, the 39-year-old Wong and 35-year-old Pong have known each other for more than a decade; they were classmates at the Academy for Performing Arts back in the 1990s, and have joined and stayed in the same company since their graduation.

Their upcoming showcase represents the second time that the two have shared a double bill (after last year’s What’s Next? Crime Scene!), while marking the third time that they’ve topped the same billings for the company (counting also the 2007 triple bill, C’est la vie, C’est l’amour). In last year’s production, Wong presented an abstract dance work that explored the interaction between body movement, multimedia, and the potentials of the theatre space, while Pong came up with a story-based performance that took her over a year – of “reading detective stories, and going over in [her] mind the multiple ways of killing a person” – to prepare.

By quiet acquiescence, the two good friends have now switched tactics for their new show, with Wong staging a punked-up version of the musical West Side Story, and Pong taking it easy in the storytelling department, instead opting to recreate a series of unrelated fragments from traditional fairytales. During the performances, the audience will be seated on each sides of Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre; on the set installed in the middle, dancers will swing from Wong’s humorous tone to Pong’s melancholic mood, respectively in colourful, florescent and sombre, grey-scale costumes.

“West Side Story is the first musical that I danced in while studying at the APA,” Wong says of the inspiration behind his own Punk Side Story. The choreographer had thought about turning the original’s 1950s riff on the Romeo and Juliet scenario into a Hong Kong-specific gangland fantasy, but, having quickly realised the limits to the semantics of dance, instead decided to erase the original’s cultural background and highlight the main themes of romance and conflicts in the story. “The audience won’t be disappointed if they come in expecting a love story,” offers Wong. “But if they’re looking to relive all the specific scenes in West Side Story, they may have to exercise their imagination more actively.”

In comparison to the star-crossed love in Punk Side Story, Pong’s more ambiance-oriented Fairy Tales – To Be Continued is every bit as ominous as its title would suggest. Originating from the choreographer’s doubts about that famous last sentence in your typical fairytale – “and then they lived happily ever after” – the work has turned out to be a far from easy assignment for Pong, who finds it almost an impossible task to translate her usual concern for the contemporary living experience for the quirky and fantastical setting. “Initially, I wanted to choreograph a 50-minute work from this sentence and investigate the modern views on marriage and relationships, but I soon recognised that I’d be doing just another fairytale sequel. And I don’t want to be the writer of just another fairytale story.”

By extracting some of the key plots from the fairytales and re-imagining what might have been if the events had turned out other ways – such as replaying Swan Lake with all-male dancers in weird costumes, or having Sleeping Beauty wake up from her coma 50 years too late – Pong has ended up with an impressionistic mood piece. “If my audience thinks that I’m a melancholic person after watching this show, I won’t mind at all. I was in a melancholic mood when I was choreographing this work; it reflects my personal history in the past three months.”

She goes on to talk about her expectations, “I don’t need my audience to understand what exactly I was thinking. As long as they – at the end of the show, after the lights are out and before the applause begins – feel sad, or subdued, or exhilarated… as long as an adjective pops up in their minds, I’m contented.” Wong, who’s known for his generally light-hearted approach, has a simpler wish: “I just hope that they can all go home with a smile.”

Happily N’ever After is at the Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre from Fri 9 to Sun 11. Tickets: 2734 9009; www.urbtix.hk.