The Hong Kong Arts Festival production Colossus, created by Stephanie Lake and performed by students of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, was staged in Hong Kong last week. (PHOTO BY ERIC HONG/PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Halfway through Colossus, I felt a sense of déjà vu. Created by Stephanie Lake and performed by the students of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), the piece reminded me of the kecak dance-and-music drama of Bali, also known as the Ramayana monkey chant. With its large ensemble, sea of arms and deeply percussive cadence, Lake’s work strongly resembles a modern restatement of the ritual dance form. 

But where the kecak dance originates from exorcist rites designed to put dancers in a trance, Colossus is highly wakeful choreography for our times: an age of social media manipulation, intolerance and alienation. From its opening sequence — in which supine dancers arranged in a circle breathe and move in unison, before being set off in various chain reactions like dominoes — this visceral work takes the audience on a dark, compelling journey through the madness of crowds.

The Hong Kong Arts Festival production Colossus, created by Stephanie Lake and performed by students of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, was staged in Hong Kong last week.   (PHOTO BY ERIC HONG/PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

For Anna Chan, dean of the School of Dance, staging the August 25-27 production — a Hong Kong Arts Festival program postponed from March — was the fulfillment of a long-held wish to collaborate with its highly acclaimed creator. Chan first saw one of Lake’s works in 2014, in the latter’s native Melbourne. 

Colossus is a powerful work that teaches dancers “how to work collectively as an ensemble”, Chan says. “Often, contemporary work is smaller in scale or highly individualistic — and obviously that’s to bring out a dancer’s individuality. But when it comes to training, it’s also important for dancers to understand how, as an ensemble, we create the power and message of a piece.”

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Lake directed the work over Zoom, just as she had successfully done last year with the Paris Conservatory. “The pandemic was very bad in early 2020 here,” Chan notes, adding that Hong Kong dance professionals and students have already had two and a half years of “exploring how to learn, teach, create new works and rehearse through this medium”.

Colossus is designed for 40-60 dancers. To make up the numbers, all three streams of the school — ballet, Chinese dance and contemporary dance — took part.

Lake has also stated that her work illustrates "the push and pull of humanity, and the exquisite patterning found in the natural world". (PHOTO BY ERIC HONG/PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Part of the work’s power resides in its scale — when 40 pairs of arms are twisting skyward, for instance, it’s an affecting sight. At times the ensemble behaves like one single breathing, sighing, shifting organism: 80 arms moving in synchronization, 40 heads turning with robotic precision.

Sometimes the troupe reacts to the movements of a soloist who dictates the action, omnipotent as the sorcerer in Disney’s classic Fantasia animated films (1940, 1999). At one point, two groups of dancers whirl around a soloist center stage, their arms contorted like gnarled tree limbs.

Vocal sounds are used to potent effect, from disconcerting gasps and hisses, to a background humming that becomes increasingly loud and dissonant. When the lights go down after the first movement, animal noises including shrieks and yips reach a frenzied timber. 

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The electronic score — highly suggestive of industrial noise and found sound — adds to the tension, its mercilessly insistent beats creating a disconcerting ambience throughout the performance. The music is by audiovisual artist Robin Fox — Lake’s longtime partner, in life as well as art.

In one sequence, each dancer is powerful for a moment as they confront another, pushing them to the side of the stage — only to immediately be confronted and pushed aside by the next person.

As a representation of the aggressive, competitive nature of contemporary society, the image is both haunting and apt. Much as with the kecak dance, one leaves Colossus feeling as though an exorcism has taken place.