Last night we opened the year in Conscious Dance with a full house of more than 20 dancers! It was a dance communion of old friends and new friends, just being in the same space together was heartwarming for me. We kicked off the Gregorian New Year of 2025 with a series named “The Hero(ine)’s Journey”. This is usually the time of year when life feels filled with new ambitions and renewed with fresh possibilities - and how we choose to create our life is a journey in itself. “The Hero’s Journey” was a term first coined by a man named Joseph Campbell who used it as a metaphor for the all-embracing journeys of deep transformation that heroes across time and place seem to share. The journey rides an arc of movement from a separation, to descent, an ordeal and the return, and these phases are made up of 12 stages altogether. Regardless of culture and history, this process seems to be fundamental and universal to all fiction and non-fiction heroes (think Star Wars, Cinderella, the Greek Odyssey, or the Chinese Red Dream Chamber). Using Campbell‘s metaphor as a starting point and reference, we embark on our grand adventure with the first dance of “In Between”.
Liane S invited me to co-facilitate with her on this theme a few weeks ago in light of the dance being on January 13, the day between both our birthdays! Her brilliant and uncanny idea made me say yes without hesitation at a time when I was in between many other decisions. We then went through a process of unravelling what this theme meant for us, our series, and our communities.
Working with Liane S brought out many nuances of the “In Between”. Not only is our birthday 2 days apart, we both have short hair, roughly the same height, both live on islands, and both Capricorns, there are also much differences between us. Liane S is famous for her meticulous spread sheets that she creates for every dance she facilitates. The spread sheet includes details of every song, its length, comments on its emotional and musical influences etc., accompanied by facilitation notes and vivid mind maps. She is also the diligent note-taker for our leaders’ meetings. I love these aspects of her very much and it was such a joy to work with her. The metaphor I used was she is the bone, while I am the flesh. I like to bring in new ideas, shake the status quo, create connective tissues, rub the fascia. So in many ways, we are quite complementary and one aspect of “In Between” is the manifestation of these differences that make up who we are as individuals and how we work in collaboration together.
For the first dance into the series, “In Between” serves as a potent beginning. It could be the preparation between readiness and departure. It could be the place between origin and destination. It could be the transition between life stages. It could also serve as a perspective shift of how we see ourselves in our landscapes, between land the sky, between buildings and doors. As well as how we understand who we are in the ever-expanding web of human ecology as we traverse between cultures, families, lovers, relationships, and communities.
A friend recently said Hong Kong is a culture of disappearance. I cannot agree more and to that I like to add that Hong Kong is a culture of “In Between”. It is a city that is always in transition (with the ubiquitous construction sites reminding us that we are always building towards something), and endlessly in between an appearance of one kind and a disappearance of another. As a trading port and colonial territory, the land is intensified as a mediator between cultures, governments, transactions, and people. In this kind of high transmission energy that we are living and breathing in every day, I often wonder how it lives within us? How is it enlivening or defeating us? In our closing circle, a dancer brought up the question of what if being in the state of in between is the permanent state? My body gave an almost immediate sense of yielding. The journey of transience is the journey we all take. My body tingled as I thought of that. And as I rang the bell to close the circle on the dance floor, I heard a gentle whisper in my ear “and every man is a hero in their own journey”.
Thank you to every dancer for your courage and willingness to embark onto our Hero(ine)’s Journey with us. Many, many thanks to our crew for preparing the stage for our grand adventure to take flight. Endless gratitude to Liane S for being the bone, the other pole, the other Liane in all the ways that make my heart tickle with joy. Gratitude to the Conscious Dance Collective for holding safe&brave space for the community to dance, express, relate, and embody freely. And may we awaken to the spirit of adventure, venturing into the liminal of all that is in between.
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