Canadian dancer Jessica Burrows performs in The Nutcracker by the Hong Kong Ballet in December 2021.Supplied
It’s a Sunday, Hennes Yuen’s day off, and she’s exhausted. The 25-year-old ballet dancer is two weeks away from the Hong Kong premiere of La Bayadère, a story of doomed romance at a royal court first performed in Russia in 1877.
The show features one of the most celebrated scenes in classical ballet, famous for being “really, really challenging,” Ms. Yuen said. Late in the second act, 24 dancers come down a steep ramp onto the stage, pausing every few seconds to carry out a slow, graceful arabesque, leaning so far forward on one leg it seems they must fall, their muscles working overtime (and to spectators, invisibly) to keep them upright.
When she speaks to The Globe and Mail, Ms. Yuen has been training for months, often six days a week. “Monday is the most challenging,” she said. “After the day off, you go back to work and are like, ‘Oh my god, what is this, how do I do this?’”
The Hong Kong Ballet was established in 1979, and in the four decades since has toured the world and won international acclaim. But it could often feel somewhat disconnected from the city itself, in part because there were so few dancers from Hong Kong, with most coming from mainland China or further afield. One review from 2016 described the company as technically adept, but lacking a distinct character, “like a shiny white envelope – without a stamp.”
This has changed under artistic director Septime Webre, who took over the company the following year, after a long and successful stint running the Washington Ballet. Mr. Webre has worked hard to bring more Hong Kong dancers into the fold, despite a lack of professional training facilities in the city, recruiting both talented youngsters and luring back dancers who have moved overseas.
Hong Kong Ballet artistic director Septime Webre oversees a practice session at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui on June 17.James Griffiths/The Globe and Mail
He has also changed how the ballet interacts with Hong Kong itself, giving it a local character that was long missing, and drawing in audiences that might have previously stayed away.
“After Septime joined the Hong Kong Ballet I think the public became more aware of it and people were really interested in coming to see us,” Ms. Yuen said.
She joined the company in 2019, around the same time as Canadian dancer Jessica Burrows. A native of Stouffville, Ont., Ms. Burrows had done a stint with the Hong Kong Ballet years earlier, soon after graduating from Canada’s National Ballet School, but left in 2017 to move back to North America. In her two years away, Ms. Burrows said, the Hong Kong Ballet had changed dramatically. She remembered walking into work at her company in Boston one day to find everyone talking about a video Hong Kong had released, part of a “ballet in the city” campaign launched by Mr. Webre.
In the video, neon-clad performers dance through a pastel-coloured public housing estate, in front of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour and atop tables in a traditional Chinese tea house, to a remix of French composer Maurice Ravel’s Boléro. “People were like, ‘Did you see what the Hong Kong Ballet put out?’ There was so much talk about it,” Ms. Burrows said. “That’s when I realized, wow, I’m really going back to a company that has a way higher profile than before.”
In an interview between rehearsals earlier this year, Mr. Webre said that when he joined, the ballet, “had history and a good foundation, but I wanted to bring some new energy and reflect Hong Kong more thoroughly.” This meant a more distinctly Hong Kong “brand identity,” and also changes to the ballet’s repertoire, bringing a local flair to classic works such as Romeo and Juliet or The Nutcracker. The former, which Mr. Webre set in the 1960s, with dancers in plaid suits and cheongsams performing under neon signage, was designed to evoke “one of the golden ages of Hong Kong,” he said.
Hong Kong Ballet toured its version of Romeo and Juliet, set in 1960s Hong Kong, in New York in January, to great acclaim.Supplied
A Cuban-American who had a peripatetic upbringing in the United States, the Bahamas, the Ivory Coast and Sudan, Mr. Webre’s international outlook “really suits Hong Kong,” Ms. Yuen said. “He gets what makes the city different and what makes it stand out. I was surprised by how authentic his version of Romeo and Juliet felt. It was so specific to Hong Kong, even the sets, we could immediately see what they were referring to.”
This shift comes at a time when many Hong Kongers are themselves searching for anything that connects with a more distinctly local identity amid a political crackdown that has reshaped Hong Kong politics, hobbled civil society and hollowed out the arts scene.
On the weekend La Bayadère premiered, 23 people were arrested for attempting to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, including artist Sanmu Chen, who chanted, “Hong Kongers, don’t be afraid,” as he was detained. After at least one performance, two police vans and an armoured anti-riot vehicle could be seen parked near the venue in downtown Tsim Sha Tsui.
No one expects the ballet, which is primarily funded by the Hong Kong government, to push political boundaries. But by better reflecting the city on stage, it may have connected with a drive that has also seen greater support for local sports teams, a resurgence of Cantopop and success for artists such as Stephen Wong, whose colourful landscapes capture the beauty of Hong Kong’s countryside in a way more familiar to locals than the stereotypical images of the city as a Blade Runner-style concrete metropolis.
The Hong Kong Ballet puts on Carmina Burana in October 2022.Conrado E. Dy-Liacco/Supplied
Ms. Yuen is still in the minority, but the Hong Kong Ballet now includes 10 local dancers, double the number it did when Mr. Webre took over. Part of the problem is that the necessary supporting structures aren’t there: Hong Kong lacks the sort of ballet schools that act as feeder programs for companies in cities such as New York and Toronto. The city’s education system is also hypercompetitive, and many parents are skeptical about their children devoting the amount of time it takes to train for a future performing career.
“Septime has really tried to get more Hong Kong dancers,” Ms. Yuen said, adding that the ecosystem is gradually improving, with more studios and competitions for young dancers to cut their teeth on. The ballet’s higher profile has also made it an easier sell to parents, even if just as an extracurricular that teaches intense discipline and focus.
During the pandemic, that discipline was tested as dancers found themselves stuck at home in tiny apartments, practising in front of Zoom. With most public venues closed, the ballet sought out alternative performance spaces, and posted videos of flash-mob-style dances in the city’s subway. At their lowest point, about half the company was diagnosed with COVID-19 in the run-up to the Christmas performance of The Nutcracker, forcing it to be scaled back.
A sense of shared suffering with audiences also strengthened the company’s commitment to putting on a good show.Supplied
But a sense of shared suffering with audiences also strengthened the company’s commitment to putting on a good show. Like Romeo and Juliet, Mr. Webre’s version of The Nutcracker is set in Hong Kong, and Ms. Burrows said audiences responded positively to seeing themselves reflected on stage. “It always brightens the mood. I’m glad we could offer a sort of relief – it’s a privilege to give that gift to people.”
Since pandemic restrictions lifted early this year, the ballet has come out swinging, touring Romeo and Juliet in New York to great acclaim, and premiering a new ballet about fashion designer Coco Chanel; it’s the type of modern, original work Mr. Webre said showed the “world class” quality of the Hong Kong Ballet. Since then, the company has also put on La Bayadère, and a ballet for children about dinosaurs set in the city – the third in Mr. Webre’s “Hong Kong trilogy” – developed with 59 Productions, the design studio behind the 2012 London Olympic Games opening ceremony.
“We are really ambitious, you can see that in our repertoire,” he said. “I feel like our star is in its ascendance.”