Review- Happy Birthday?- CCDC
25-4-15
By: Tom Hope
Birthdays are a certainty in life, coming around like clockwork, a fixed point around which each life can turn. And, unlike death and taxes, they’re a cause for celebration. Or are they?
I thought the ‘birthday’ here might be CCDC’s 35th (which the company celebrated last year) but it’s more personal than that. Choreographer Noel Pong turned 40 this February and (per the programme notes) got married and baptized in the months either side – so there was a lot going on for her as this piece was devised and realized. What might have distracted her has instead inspired a show which bursts, as in her previous work, with energy and ideas but at the same time has focus and humour plus a structured, albeit abstracted, narrative to deliver a brilliantly edifying confection.
Over 4 acts (titled ‘An Unexceptional Celebration’, ‘Blissful Solitude’, ‘Fleeting Eternity’ and ‘The Beginning of the End’), the scenes revolve mostly around a white-suited ‘birthday boy’ (Bruce Wong) and the hopes and fears brought on by his birthday celebrations. It sounds simple but the result is an enchanting meditation on the complex way we long for independence and at the same time to be ‘in dependence’ on others.
Of last year’s ‘The Buying Game 2.0’, I wrote that to be a truly stunning show it needed to integrate the various dance pieces with the overall ostensible themes. Well, ‘Happy Birthday?’ does exactly that, from start to finish. The production values (with the same design team as TBG2.0 of Low See Hoe for lighting, Ha Yan-Pui for sound and Charfi Hung for set and costumes) are as high as ever. So are the performance levels, with the corps of 13 working with and for each other, the precision and passion of their movements perfectly matching each piece. But what brings this work to the highest level is its coherent thematic development, using motifs (of music, motion and story) to engage the audience’s heads as well as hearts.
It starts with a birthday party and a cake with a single candle – so far, so predictable. But as the cake gets eaten on stage and the birthday boy’s face gets thrust into the cake to the laughter of all but his – and as more and more cakes appear on stage, each with a candle to light their way - something magical happens and the dance becomes much more than an accomplished combination of music and movement.
There’s extra magic in the mix in a middle section deploying clusters of black party balloons attached to a black-wrapped gift, dropped in sequence from the flies to demarcate the stage and shape the flow of the dancers, who then lift and carry the ‘balloon gifts’ like streamers to become part of the dance itself.
This ‘all black on white’ effect repeats throughout and especially at the close with a similar coup de theatre, a ‘storm’ of black confetti raining down like ash on a climactic pas de deux through a lattice of mist and laser-light, leaving the birthday boy stretched out ‘for dead’.
The exquisite irony of this closing tableau (suggestive of how we might all right now be dancing our way down the years to a melt-down of climactic change) is a fitting culmination to a work that’s peppered with equivalently ambivalent observations - of the way we interact with each other and of the joy and/or despair this can bring.
I could go on. Instead, I’ll invite – no, sorry, implore – you to see it for yourself. If I make it seem terribly high-brow, don’t be fooled – this piece is fun – a LOT of fun – as were the birthday cookies handed out to us as we left the theatre. But it is so much more besides…
Happy Birthday? is playing through April 26th. For more information, click here.
Comments
Yuxin
Thanks so much Mr Hope! Would have missed it if I didn't read your review. Both fun & moving, and interesting music choices. An overdue b-day celebration for myself too. My only complaint is that it's a bit too loud for someone who seldoms goes to bars, clubs, rock concerts and the like.
26 April 2015