Areas of Unravel: Laughter and Language in the Studio at ArtsCross 2025

By Tom Hastings

Below are a series of notes taken while sitting in the studio, observing choreographic processes, during ArtsCross 2025 at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. The notes conclude with a transcript of the presentation I gave alongside my colleagues from Hong Kong, Taipei, and Beijing.

11 June

Group 1: ZHAO Zhibo (Beijing)

Zhibo is speaking in Mandarin. I cannot understand. The dancers are moving through a sequence in sync. Tracing the hands over the face. Lunging forwards. On the diagonal. Throwing. Shuffling. Lunging with right arm extended. Hand waves. Laughter as the dancers miss their cue. Regroup and start again. Lots of laughter, releasing tension from the movement. The dancers all face one direction, finding an edge. The directionality of their arms, carving out a clear line; a line that is precise. The laughter is not part of the choreography, but it serves to release tension from the edge. The dancers face Zhibo, listening to feedback. One moment in the sequence involves a quick wiggle of the hips; another moment sees them assuming a power pose, arms fixed in the body builder’s classic pose. The dancers trace circles on the floor with their feet. There is a typhoon warning. Signal No. 1 has been hoisted. The dancers are assembled as a group, standing two feet apart. The synchronicity breaks down and the dancers improvise based on the movement vocabulary, disassembling. ‘Good’, Zhibo says – I can make out individual words in English. The language barrier doesn’t really matter. I can watch the movement and the gestures as Zhibo offers feedback. The dancers break out into pairs, chatting, stretching, moving through fragments of the work. They seem to be working through problems. One pair is very animated, moving on the floor and jumping, the other two are almost stationary. The contrast offers a nice change after the synchronicity of the group work. The dancers shift into trios. Two of them lift the third dancer. I do not know exactly what is happening. The language barrier is more felt when the dancers break out into self-directed work. What is the task? What prompt has the choreographer offered? The not knowing exposes a rift, an edge to understanding. I speak to Zhibo during a water break. She tells me that the dancers worked through tasks last week – the movements I see now were generated through that process. The pairs and trios relate to different sections of the work. It is difficult not to imagine the work I see as preliminary to a piece for performance. Where is the line between theatrical performance and work-in-progress? (I want to avoid over-using the word edge; hopefully synonyms like ‘line’ and ‘distinction’ signify in relation to that term.)

Yuki Masui’s rehearsal. Talking in English; the dancer, Yao, translates. Dancers are moving independently. Yuki’s assistant Cher leads the movement sequence. Counts on eight. Shifts from floorwork to standing. Fast paced. Quick shifts in arms. Inflections. Break out into groups. Moving over each other. Contact. Martial arts. Can you spin, twirl, send your leg wider. Let’s try it with the music. Don’t forget the intention of invading the other person’s space, so it doesn’t just become a cool move. Walking in circle to count of 8. Yuki will count one round then will stop.

12 June

LIU Mengchen (Beijing)

Hugs Olivia – a London dancer – you don’t have any problems. OK, from the second part. Voiceover. Olivia says she misses nature. Voices in other languages. Two groups of three. Flowing, melodic music. 5, 6, 7, 8. Your body needs to relax. 1, 2, 3, hold. Olivia waves. I wish I knew the other dancers’ names! We respond to what we know. There is a limit to understanding. Mengchen walks up to the dancers, marks the sequence opposite them. The proximity produces a sense of urgency. Keep your heart open, light up your eyes. I’m a line. Keep your eyes. And jump. The dancers assemble and disassemble. There is a direct relationship between movement and music. A story is being told that I can’t quite follow – it seems that the voiceovers take a range of forms. Arms extended, palms up, shifting from one foot to the other, on the diagonal, eyes forwards. A piggyback shifts into a half embrace. OK, OK! Keep it together. Hug, smell.

Li Yongjing (Hong Kong)

Throwing a bundle from one dancer to another. Jump and lift. Body, object. Shifts in language. Throw and fall, throw and fall. Dancers are spread out through the space. Remember what I said yesterday, the timing. Can we try this? The dancers roll, gather, run, walk in tight circles. I know the timing is not fixed now. Can we try the lift again? We need to practice for the running, because otherwise every time you are in the wrong position, thank you. The dancers surround one of their peers and lift them high, so they can catch the bundle that is thrown in their direction. The dancer leans too far forwards and cannot sustain the lift. The next attempt works better. They practice the lift and throw. Sometimes the dancer catches the bundle, sometimes she doesn’t. If she doesn’t catch it, it’s OK, continue. I prefer the times the dancer doesn’t catch the bundle. More elaborate holds. One dancer is lifted high; she lies on the hands of her peers. Another dancer is held horizontally by several of her peers. OK take a break.

HUANG Yu-fen (Taipei)

Three dancers surround their peer, who is standing. The dancer is pulled in different directions, restrained, almost tortured? Dancer falls backwards. Walking forwards while restrained. Flowing movement of dancer supported by many hands: head forwards, neck backwards. A different dancer is dragged across the floor by various limbs. They shift into a foetal position, before the dancers spin them. Dancers hold hands in a line. Three, two, one, cross! The dancers reformulate, clustering around one dancer. Dancers manipulate one dancer, organising and reorganising their limbs around their body. The dancer, doll-like, accepts the manipulation, sinking to the floor. Yu-fen gives feedback, approaching the dancers, giving mini-demonstrations on specific points. The dancer is pushed and pulled, and skyrockets into another dancer’s groin. Laughter ensues. 5, 6, 7, 8. The dancers step forwards in unison. They remain close together, working as a tight group. There are lots of micro-instructions. A fast point. Laughter. I miss it. Did someone get accidentally slapped? Moments of choreographed contact. Aha, Yu-fen presents an elastic band – I heard about the elastic in the choreographers/scholars meeting on Monday. The dancers form a clump. One of them kneels, lowers to the floor, another lies on top of them. Elastic band is held in catapult formation.

The dancers stand in a staggered line, vibrate. Bits of music. One dancer, standing alone, is inspected by their peers. Their limbs are pulled. Forms of stretching, pulling, restraint, holding, supporting. The line between support and restraint? Dragging, some work to manipulate a dancer, before shifting roles. Everyone gets a turn to be manipulated, to manipulate.

Yuki Masui (London)

Can you use the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Yao is translating. Laughter. Can you just mark the movement, from here. Feet shifting on standing. Shoulder. If there’s a space can you go through it. Can you do your solo here? I just need to cut it a little bit short. Do your solo, I will say stop. What’s left? *Says left and right in Mandarin* That’s great. Actually, you don’t have to go through. Thank you so much. Am I saying it wrong? Yes. I mean no! Two dancers rehearse on one side of the room while Yuki speaks to the others. We can start on 7. So, finish your flow phrase. Ready, 5, 6, 7, 8. Can you reverse to get up. Can you swipe. Yeah, yeah. Can we just maximise the… yeah, yeah, yeah. Once you finish, can you go out that way. Round, round, round. From here, can you do your phrase, but facing that way. Can we keep, going that way. Or circle, circle, and… Yuki motions and the two dancers nod, jog to meet the others, jogging around the perimeter of the space rather than across it.

13 June

HUANG Yu-fen (Taipei)

Gentle contact movement while Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies play. The dancers get to work. The rehearsal is beginning slowly. Two dancers partner while others mill around the space. The movements involve shirt-pulling, tussling, pushing and pulling. So, manipulation appears again. The agency of the dancer. I need to be stronger. One dancer jumps into the arms of another. One dancer lands on his belly on the back of his partner, before tensing once, lifting upwards, and rolling over, hands planted on the floor. Once more, from the beginning. Is it OK? Almost, almost. Strenuous, strong movements. The quality of your movement, make your body like a ball. Gestures of the ball bouncing, slapping the hand. Don’t rush, calm down. They duet for camera while the choreographer is out of the room. It’s a better run.

LIU Mengchen (Beijing)

Ensemble. Disassembling in unison, twisting and turning on the centre. One dancer hops onto the back of another, piggyback. Development from the run I saw yesterday. Mengchen runs with her dancer, manipulating each one in turn. One dancer drops to the side, then the next one drops to the side. One by one, they drop to the side. The studio windows give way to a view of skyscrapers. An advert, clinging to the windows of a glass building, features the slogan, “Life at its Peak”. I need to find elements of myself that resemble or emulate certain characteristics of nature – the narrative voiceover comes in. Olivia’s voice. The only dancer’s voice I can understand. We begin again. Arms remain clasped in a loose, flowing gesture, moving softly overhead. The dancers gather on one side of the space. Single arms raised, before movement begins. Moments of stillness. Tableaux form. 5, 6, 7, go. Dancers fall and roll, stand and raise hands – motif of a waving gesture. Dancers stand in a circle holding hands. Dancers reassemble into a line, facing downstage. ‘I am…’ dancer stands out with the personal statement, introducing themselves to the audience. My parents separated when I was a kid.

TSANG Terry (Hong Kong)

Dancers are all moving independently. Someone checks their phone, is that part of it? States of movement and stillness. AI to capture dance movements. They’re using different body parts to generate movement or sound – the dancers become musicians. Is it possible to let the rehearsal video – They need to create a sound for AI? Two artists, one composer, one video programmer. What is the imagination when we use AI? Terry comes up and talks to me, shares his process. For the movement, I use two qualities, soft like water, hard like bone. They created solos three days ago in response to broken bones. Now they are remembering it. Every day I talk to myself. Like a text, today, I will answer my question. Like a script. Now we watch the dancers offering their individual solos. Terry will choose movements from everyone’s solos. Terry observes solos and selects one of the dancers who is moving on the floor in a monster-like way. He then instructs a group of dancers to imitate her movements. They will now teach each other. Nice part of the process. There is so much movement, the movement is precious. What’s your criterion? Creepy. Bone dancing in the river. What is Terry’s role? To organise solo material into a script. Watching the dancers teach each other is really nice. Drop, heel, rainbow, pick up your feet, and move it. Quick exhale and move. Twist.

YU Cheng-chieh (Taipei)

So there’s more surprise. Now review the duet. Much more entuning. Good. Good. Stay near each other. You’re speaking from your feet so you feel the connection to the floor. Both of you practice a little bit. How do you utilise the gestures coming up from your feet. Working in pairs. I’m curious to learn more about entunement, a term Cheng-chieh has used several times. Dancers sit on a row of chairs. Music comes in. One dancer runs forwards, another takes her chair. A battle over the chairs. A third dancer gets up, another pushes him. One dancer stands on her chair before running forwards – a fifth dancer then takes her chair. A battle over the chairs. Frontal: dancers face downstage, each moving independently yet in relation: ‘entuned’. Spacing-wise…

16 June

Yuki Masui (London)

Cher is leading, Yuki watches and comments. Big punch, yeah. This one can be big? This can go big, the second one needs to be… the opposition. Working through sequence over and over. Intensive practice. Gestures of throwing, catching, holding, kicking. Lock it in. Let’s have a tea break.

Tsang Terry (Hong Kong)

Two groups. The dancers disaggregate and come back together. Decomposition. The dancers begin in a line, in asymmetrical poses on the floor, limbs askew. One by one, they reconstitute their poses, advancing singly and then as a group. It’s effective. They end up lying down, arms stretched out, fingertips tracing shapes on the floor, heads facing the audience downstage, exhaling audibly, lifting a single leg, in unison now, turning over. The dancers disaggregate. Group movement. Clubbing movement. Monster movement. There is a sense of movement deliberated. Studied gesture. An intentionality. Dancers slap the floor. Progressively percussive. My own frustration about being able to transmit. The way language abstracts from movement, so that the edges between processes blur. I write ‘throw’ or ‘catch’. The ultimate abstraction – 5, 6, 7,8. The form of establishing an edge.

17 June

Li Yongjing (Hong Kong)

Throwing paper, lifting dancers in turn, dancing on paper laid on floor. Marking separation and connectivity. Dancers hug with paper between their bodies. Beautiful partnering. Ideas of clothing, shelter, masking, shrouding (funeral), carrying body on back, holding paper taut to make a screen, letting the paper float, ‘soft landing’. I like how the paper gets progressively more crumpled as the progress goes on. Crumpled into a ball then opened again. I keep expecting the paper to be disposed, for the dancers to use a new piece, but they don’t, they stick with it, and as time goes on the paper picks up more and more marks of movement, inscriptions, notations, indexes. Pulling the paper like a tug of war, it doesn’t rip, remarkable tensile strength and integrity,

HUANG Yu-fen (Taipei)

Dancers are all wearing sneakers and kneepads. Playing a kind of game but I cannot see the rules. Running in the space. Passing through. When you cross paths with someone, grab hands and spin around. Someone gets injured, a collision. That’s part of it. One dancer brandishes a string of elastic bands, which they use to chase the other dancers – flicking it, holding the string aloft like a lasso. Notice different forms of conflict. “You want some”, says Bertie. The lasso is longer, it now looks like a skipping rope. We wait for the elastic to hit someone in the face, or get caught in someone’s hair, which it inevitably does, very funny.

18 June

HUANG Yu-fen (Taipei)

The dancers are catapulting. At one point, they say “rubber, rubber, rubber, rubber”. It’s an intriguing word that makes me think of condoms. And the fact that these dancers are covered in rubber bands that function like protection. The elastic covers they bodies, like clothing, and occasionally a piece will snap. The dancers slap the elastic on each other, pointing, teasing playing. Every time someone gets punished, the next game gets more intense. Posing downstage, staring at audience intensely. They’re like superheroes, or villains, with the music.

20 June

TSANG Terry

We meet for a discussion with the dancers, choreographer and some scholars facilitated by Dong Yan. The discussion is taking place in Mandarin (I think!) or could be Cantonese?? so I cannot follow along. There is a live translation between those two languages. In the first two weeks, the dancers were moving, generating material. Music, composed in response to the dancers’ movement, was introduced in Week 3, and now there is a question: about how the introduction of the music affected the dancers. Another dancer: In the theatre she felt as though the situation had gone beyond her imagination. At Beijing Dance Academy, the students have access to motion capture technologies. The discussion is focused on the interaction between movement and different media: images, music, and how the dancers engage with these intermedia encounters. The dancers in Terry’s process had a changing relation to sound. Something here about the shifting relationships, edges, between different media. Terry describes the shifting relationship between the AI capture, movement, and music, where these elements enter a kind of loop, mutually impacting one another. Do you listen to the other bodies’ movements at the same time as listening to the sound? What is the relationship between these elements? Before the sound, we worked with the counting machine. Then we cut off the counting machine and put the sound in our body? Everyone embodied as sense of when to move, and when to pause? My question to the dancers was: How did your quality of listening change through this process? How did you feel this change in your body? One dancer asks whether there could be more unison between the music and the movement. Dancers feel like they can create their own music. I ask a question about how the dancers have experienced not dancing to the music? As dancers, we are used to dancing to the music, to advance a story etc. What happens when we let that go? One dancer: I feel like the music is there to support our imagination. The music represents different elements, i.e. representing water. Another dancer says: It feels like the music is there to allow the audience to connect with the world of the work. I always practice the dance without music and hear it for the first time in the performance. For me, music gives another medium for the audience to connect with us, the performers. Yi-jung: My background is in dance education. This is not just about the performance, it’s about the education process. Finding your identity, your own sounds of the body… these explorations are deep and will help you figure out what kind of dancers you are.

Final Presentation: Areas of Unravel: Laughter and Language in the Studio at ArtsCross 2025

The brief of ArtsCross is studio research, ideas in motion, and the sharing of work-in-progress. Something that has come up repeatedly, however, both among the choreographers and the scholars, has been the pressure of creating a work, of putting on a show. Like my colleagues, I’m interested in the tension between the brief of ArtsCross and the reality on the ground. Because we scholars started attending rehearsals in Week 2, we were not privy to the process of generating material in the first week. However, in the studio, we observed moments in which the choreographer’s vision came up against unforeseen, spontaneous obstacles. In the first café, choreographer YU Cheng-chieh mentioned that in Week One she attempted to teach the dancers a martial arts sequence, but this approach failed. The question then comes; how do you respond to failure? How does the choreographer pivot in the midst of a process, when you come up against an unforeseen block or obstacle? Spontaneous moments in the studio, when for instance an instruction misfires or two dancers collide, reveal something other than the performance work; namely, the shifting field of relationality. I will briefly share two such moments of unravel.

HUANG Yu-fen (Taipei)

Dancers are all wearing sneakers and kneepads. Playing a kind of game but I cannot see the rules. Running in the space. Passing through. When you cross paths with someone, grab hands and spin around. Someone gets injured, a collision. That’s part of it. One dancer brandishes a string of elastic bands, which they use to chase the other dancers – flicking it, holding the string aloft like a lasso. Notice different forms of conflict. “You want some”, says Bertie. The lasso is longer, it now looks like a skipping rope. We wait for the elastic to hit someone in the face, or get caught in someone’s hair, which it inevitably does, very funny.

ZHAO Zhibo (Beijing)

Zhibo is speaking in Mandarin. I cannot understand. The dancers are moving through a sequence in sync. Tracing hands over the face. Lunging forwards. On the diagonal. Throwing. Shuffling. Lunging with right arm extended. Hand waves. Laughter as the dancers miss their cue. Regroup and start again. More laughter, releasing tension from the movement. The dancers all face one direction, finding an edge. The directionality of their arms, carving out a clear line; a line that is precise. The laughter is not part of the choreography, but it serves to release tension. One moment in the sequence involves a quick wiggle of the hips; another sees the dancers assuming a power pose, arms fixed in the body builder’s classic pose. The dancers trace circles on the floor with their feet. There is a typhoon warning, Signal No. 1 has been hoisted. They are soon assembled as a group, standing two feet apart. The synchronicity breaks down and the dancers improvise based on the movement vocabulary, disassembling. ‘Good’, Zhibo says – I can make out individual words in English. The language barrier doesn’t really matter. I can watch the movement and the gestures as Zhibo offers feedback. The dancers break out into pairs, chatting, stretching, moving through fragments of the piece. They seem to be working through problems. One pair is very animated, moving on the floor and jumping, the other two are almost stationary. The contrast offers a nice change after the synchronicity of the group work. The dancers shift into trios. Two of them lift the third dancer. I do not know exactly what is happening. The language barrier is more felt when the dancers break out into self-directed work.

What is the task? What prompt has the choreographer offered? What does it mean for something not to work? We are often on the verge of not knowing. Where is the line between support and restraint? Between theatrical performance and work-in-progress? The not knowing exposes a rift, an edge to understanding. I speak to Zhibo during a water break. She tells me that the dancers worked through tasks last week – the movements I see now were generated through that process. The pairs and trios relate to different sections of the work. It is difficult not to imagine the work I see as preliminary to a piece for performance, but the dancers offer clues through their laughter.