words yvonne teh

Mui Cheuk-yin converts a 49-year-old Cantonese opera into contemporary dance and wonders about the eerie urges of romantic love.

She may be best known these days for her modern, even post-modern, dance work but choreographer cum dancer Mui Cheuk-yin has not forgotten her Chinese classical dance roots. And it was over the course of her classical training that she became acquainted with the Cantonese opera by legendary librettist Tang Tik-sang which serves as the main inspiration for Desperately Seeking Miss Blossom, the current HK Dance Company production for which Mui is the choreographer. Tang’s inspirational work is, of course, The Reincarnation of Lady Plum Blossom, the bizarre tale of a pair of female doppelgangers and a young man who professes to love them both.

Desperately Seeking Miss Blossom is not the first of Mui’s dance creations associated with the super prolific Tang’s final opera (whose 1959 premiere was made all the more memorable when the 42-year-old writer suffered a heart attack during the performance and died later that night). For back in 1994, she had teamed up with composer Kung Chi-shing, dramatist and set designer Ho Yingfun, and lighting designer Tommy Wong to work on a short dance piece, Shadow of the Blossoms, that explored the part of Wai-leung (aka Miss Blossom) for the HK Arts Festival.

Over the course of their collaboration, Mui laughingly recalls, “We thought ‘It’s quite fun!’ so we looked for a chance to make it into a full-length piece.” But it is only now, 14 years later, that the chance presented itself to the four colleagues. Mui was intent on finding the right group of dancers for this work, specifically those “with a similar background as me [who] have a really strong Chinese background but also at the same time [are] open-minded enough to be able to accept some modern ideas”.

She found them at the HK Dance Company, a troupe for which she was the principal dancer from 1981 to 1989. As Mui remembers, that was a time the fledgling company, that only came into being in ’81, went through “a very interesting period”. In its first decade, it was more or less experimental, staging productions choreographed by people from a range of backgrounds, from traditional to modern, Eastern, Western and even East by way of the West. Local modern dance doyen Willy Tsao was one of the choreographers alongside Chinese opera professionals and others.

“It all broadened my horizon,” says Mui. “I suddenly discovered the modern world!” In particular, she fondly recalls performing a solo dance about Shatin’s Amah Rock choreographed by Helen Lai. Rather than relating the entire legend of the rock in the shape of a woman carrying a baby on her back, the dance piece focused on “the last moment of [the woman] becoming a rock”. It was deeply significant for Mui, for, as she explains, “I’m not interpreting something, I’m not showing you something. Instead, I’m becoming that rock!”

Although that dance was performed some two decades ago, Mui’s experience of it remains strong and vivid. “I was really moved by the dance. This was the first time that I told myself, ‘I am myself totally inside the dance.’” Also, for the first time, she discovered, “Dance and emotion are joined together!” an epiphany that led initially to curiosity and then to New York to study modern dance.
Curiosity is also what Desperately Seeking Miss Blossom’s choreographer feels when contemplating the story of The Reincarnation of Lady Plum Blossom. Ever since she was introduced to that Chinese opera during her dance student days, she has been intrigued, not so much by the dance movements, but by the work’s “strange” love story. From her perspective as a modern woman, it is difficult to understand the motivations and feelings of the title character, a virginal female who decides to sacrifice her life for another after a brief encounter on a boat with a young male stranger. And not just to renege on her agreement to become an old man’s concubine either. As Mui puts it (and appears to so badly want to ask the young woman), “It’s like ‘What happened? You don’t know this man but you’re willing to die for him!’”

Still, if the woman’s behaviour is hard to understand (or, as Mui more kindly says, is “fascinating”), the two male characters’ is even more so. After all, the younger man not only falls in love with a woman he barely knows but then also falls in love with another maiden just because she looks the same as the first. As for the old man, Mui says, “He treats women like objects. It’s like ‘You’re my pet. I can give you to somebody in the morning, and then I get you back [later].’ He’s got 36 concubines!”

It is not too surprising, then, that Mui will explore the males’ thinking in Desperately Seeking Miss Blossom, a dance piece that’s not so much a modern adaptation of Tang’s opera as an examination of the relations between men and women through the lives of the opera’s three main characters. Furthermore, she warns, audiences should not expect a linear storyline in this dance presentation. “It’s several lines together,” she says. “I just pick up some issues that interest me. We talk the same things all the time. Always.”

As she readily agrees, Desperately Seeking Miss Blossom is an unusual production for the HK Dance Company but she laughs off descriptions of the piece, including in official publicity blurbs, as ‘post-post-modern’. The work, Mui says, is more along the lines of “the traditional in the modern, like back to the future!”

The HK Dance Company will perform Desperately Seeking Miss Blossom from January 25 to 27 at the Kwai Tsing Theatre’s Auditorium. The January 25 and 26 evening shows commence at 7:45pm while the Sunday, January 27, matinee starts at 3pm. Tickets are $260, $180 and $120 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.