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Carla Escoda for Huffington Post
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/carla-escoda/12-hot-young-choreographe_b_6883318.html?guccounter=1

Originality and crackerjack dancing were on ample display at the Hong Kong Arts Festival’s Contemporary Dance Series last week. Young Hong Kong choreographers furnished two double bills and a third programme crammed with seven 10-minute pieces. Sponsored by the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the series is in its fourth year and provides an important platform for emerging dance-makers.
In dance, 10 minutes is an awfully long time, and 30 minutes can feel like an eternity. While every piece opened strongly and imaginatively, a few failed to sustain interest.
The series was characterized by a preoccupation with male-male partnering, in four duets and one trio. The most exhilarating of these was Victor Fung’s From the Top, which mocked the genre of male pas de deux - although that wasn’t evident for the first few minutes, in which Fung led us down the garden path by creating a climate of fear onstage. The sight of a rigid figure, a burlap sack over his head, being manipulated by another man, immediately conjured up harrowing thoughts of recent ISIS executions deliberately staged for the benefit of millions of YouTube watchers.
Suddenly, we hear a voice (“OK, thank you”) and the dancers pause. We realize that we have been witnessing a rehearsal, and that this is a break for notes from the choreographer. As the voice rambles on, two electronic screens mounted against the backdrop light up periodically to spell out the dancers’ thoughts (in both Cantonese and English). The dancers themselves remain silent, their faces expressionless.
“So exactly how am I supposed to be kidnapped more abstractly?” muses one.
“Seriously, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” fumes the other.
“Now you want to cut my solo, WTF?”
“I bet my ass looks huge in this costume.”
It’s even funnier if you don’t understand Cantonese. You’re in a fog while the choreographer is speaking - until the signboard lights up with the dancer’s reaction.
From the Top incarnates the ever-present tension between dancemaker and dancers. A choreographer must contend with human bodies and their maddening variations, imperfections and unpredictability. A dancer, on the other hand, lives with the insecurity that he cannot deliver what the choreographer envisions. Communication breakdown is inevitable.
Our hapless dancers - Kenny Leung and Ronny Wong, both very talented and very funny - resume rehearsal, but frustration only grows as the choreographer makes increasingly ridiculous demands of them (“So I have to keep traveling, but stay in a split?”) Partnered lifts get increasingly more convoluted. The movement veers from the genuinely moving to the clichéd - including those awkward upside-down lifts in which one dancer’s face is two centimetres from the other dancer’s crotch. The screens continue to register the dancers’ silent scorn at the choreographer’s pretentiousness (“So now I’m supposed to be transforming into Spiderman?”)
From the Top and Justyne Li Sze-yeung and Wong Tan-ki’s The Trouble-maker’s Concerto(reviewed earlier for Bachtrack) were the two standout long pieces.

FROM THE TOP

Petrova Mira in Tánckritika.hu

Excerpt from original Hungarian article
http://tanckritika.hu/kategoriak/jegyzet/971-petrova-mira-kettos-keresztek

On the third and fourth day a number of performances of different styles and directions were presented, of which Victor Fung’s ‘From the Top’ would be a mistake to leave unmentioned. The Hong Kong-born choreographer’s creation has been beautifully supported by the Tanzmesse’s rather large, open, podium-like stage. The performance in line with the outside world’s aesthetical expectations is a result of long months of work, whose excessive seriousness and tension is broken by bringing the rehearsal process to the stage. The parody of the far from straightforward relationship between creator and artist is very inspiring. It reminds me of a dancer who does not love his job, but in the absence of any other qualifications is forced to dance for living. Or the terrible, unbearable choreographers who ruin the lives of the artists who really love what they do and work hard. I enjoy balancing on the verge of the real rehearsal, the mocked rehearsal and the real, to be performed dance. But how real it is and what exactly is originality? Do we ever see the true self of any of the dancers on stage peeking behind the empty gazes? Do we really want to see them? Can it be, that we rather want to see we imagine of someone, that is aesthetically pleasing, beautiful and exciting instead of getting know who they really are? One thing is certain, that in case we crave for something cheerful instead of "conceptual dance" and constant brooding, the duet of the two skilled and funny dancers is the best choice.