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Student Sharing: Student forum in Digital International Festival for Dance Academies (IFDA)

Tsoi Ka-king

21 Jun 2022

At the Digital International Festival for Dance (IFDA), I held a student forum based on my independent study project “Constructing a Contact Improvisation Performance”.

To achieve that,  my team and I will work for 2 years to create a final performance in 2023. The student forum is a work-in-progress presentation.

Over the past year, we worked on the “Sculpture”, a structured jam. To test out different variables such as tools and structure for CI performance.

The international exchange is the essence of the SWEAT festival. We invited the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA) to be our guest presenter. We created a written format of tools & structure and shared with students to see how they interpret the structure in a written format and transform it into a dance. It was like reading a book, to dance what you read.

It was so lovely to present our work and to gain inspiration from the dance world. The audience asked many interesting questions about choice of music, and movement quality and gave me their responses after watching both groups of demonstration by BDA and HKAPA. We were all learning from each other and from ourselves.

I realized that once an artwork is over "drilled", it was really important to step out and bring new inspirations to the original idea.

Sharing the work with my dancers to the world was a real milestone. I look forward to continuing this journey into my final performance in 2023 with other new elements such as improvised music, lighting, and costume.

I would like to thank all who made this happen. Thank you to my dancers, my supervisor Ms. Leila McMillan, the Beijing Dance Academy, and the SWEAT festival team.