As usual the sound of construction outside my window roused me from my sleep at 11 in the morning so I decided that I would try to make it to some dance workshops I signed up for in Quarry Bay. I talked to one of the volunteers and asked where one of the performances or workshops were going to be and she pointed at a hallway where some dancers were chillin'. At first I thought it was absurd that they were going to try to dance in -- not even a room but in a rectangular hallway -- and figured that I was mistaken since it was possible some things were lost in translation as I was conversing in Cantonese. Well lo and behold a minute later the young dancers got into formation and started dancing. and moving towards the audience. so close that we had to get out of the way and refocus our attention to whereever the dancers were taking us. I was pleasantly surprised and confused that they were travelling throughout the commercial building to dance. And afterwards pranced outdoors leading us to the next performance and this continued in similiar manner throughout the rest of the festival with the last performances melding into the next in a different location.

 I started off at the Quarry Bay MTR and ended up weaving in and out of the Taikoo commercial buildings Tong Chong Street and outside to the fountains and park in front of One Island East a couple blocks away.
The performers danced up the moving escalator stairs, making sillhouettes in the building windows, and ending with an outdoor performance in the water fountain. I was also really surprised at how smooth it was for the dancers to move past the audience and for the audience to instinctively give way to the dancers. The staff still had to usher people out of the way but at least no one got hit in the face (I was in Taiwan a few weeks ago and my friends and I happened to be a bboy event @ Luxy and this bboy was trying to be really cool by doing some move on the ground spinning around super close to the audience and literally landed on one of my friends, HAHA).

Overall it was an interactive, novel, and inspirational experience for me to be an audience in a site specific dance performance. Most of the performances were modern/contemporary dance but there was some: tap, drums, hip hop, photo exhibit. And I ended up skipping the workshops I was signed up for, oopsies. I have some short videos clips I want to share but once again blogspot is changing things up and I swear there is no longer a video clip icon, so until the icon appears again, I can't post.

"The focus of the dance festival in 2007 was on site-specific dance, it has proven that site-specific dance works though abstract in concept, could be equally well received with the audience. The proximity between performers and audience is uncommon to most dance festivals in Hong Kong, where audiences can only obtain a fixed view of the performance, whereas, site-specific dance helps breaking down the wall between dancers and audiences and creates a much friendlier, spontaneous and stimulating art experience." (Urban Dance Festival @ blogspot)


I spent the rest of the night in Causeway Bay shopping, eating, and taking sticky pictures with some of my exchange friends. On the way to the MTR we passed by some police, ambulance, lots of yellow tape crisscrossed everywhere, and a throng of people rubbernecking and I found out that it was another case of an acid bottle being thrown off a roof and 4-6 shoppers were hit. It seems like these acid rain cases don't faze any of the local people.  I still ended up in Causeway Bay later that night singing K.