Christina Danyang Huang is a dance student, currently in her 3rd year of the B.F.A. program in Contemporary Dance at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. In this contribution she shares her experience creating original, collaborative dance work during lockdown for COVID-19. 

During the lockdown in 2021, news reports were filled with confirmed cases of Covid-19 and sad stories of life, death, and chaos. Heartbreaking tales, empty streets, the shortage of masks, and the worsening situation in medical care touched my heart deeply. We are experiencing an important juncture in human history, which is not only critical, but also historical, and it is of great significance to the development of mankind and society. I started to think about what I could do as a young artist in the 21st century with available technologies and the internet. “Do something” was the initial thought that stimulated my creative mind and motivated me to make use of my talent in dance. My hope was that through creative work I could use artistic vocabulary to record the inner world of human beings during the epidemic. 

The creation of the dance piece N95 was a spontaneous creation out of pure creative motivation and a desire to do something under a disappointing situation and with limited resources. Thoughts without action are useless! During the lockdown, I couldn't enter the dance studio to practice (Hong Kong was under lockdown). I had to stay at home in a small space. Under these circumstances, I thought of my dancer friend Lin Fan in the United States, who is a contemporary dance student. Back then, Lin was able to enter the studio under social restrictions and pandemic prevention measures. I shared my ideas with Lin who was very interested and thought it would be a meaningful dance project.

My intention was to use the work to connect with others who were still suffering from the pandemic. In addition to taking long daily online classes at home, I collaborated with Lin and together we completed N95 virtually. We collaborated and choreographed this cross-continents project N95, between North America and Asia. My role was choreographer and Lin’s was that of dancer. We overcame the challenges of time zones, resources, technology, and space to make this project a reality. We conducted rehearsals, tested various choreographic approaches, and polished the final dance through daily online video conference calls. We laughed, cried, and felt exuberant when we finally produced an 11-minute solo dance work within a month. 

We were able to embody the mixed feelings that expressed the inner world of human beings during the pandemic by combining movements, music, messages, news, and major events happening back then into the choreography. N95 reflects these complex emotions people experience during the epidemic, including sadness, despair, anxiety, depression, loneliness, suspicion, and also the happiness after reunion or healing. In the choreography, we captured the unsettled situations and feelings during the pandemic from the perspective of an observer. Through modern dance, we explored the hidden psychological worlds of people behind their masks. I further elaborate on these thoughts in this interview.

Shortly after the creation of N95, I received a call from The Innovative Performance Festival, which was held by The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. I submitted N95 and became one of the recipients of the innovative performance award. The work was featured at the Innovative Performance Festival at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.