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Time is such an inescapable part of existence that it’s easy to not think about, marked only by the sun’s rising and setting and the minutiae of our daily routines. But how we experience time can open up a lot of interesting debates and imaginations, and this grey area is what the City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) is attempting to explore with their dance festival this year.
The City Contemporary Dance Festival (CCDF) is the dance company’s biennial event, gathering top-notch creatives from the global dance scene every two years to showcase Hong Kong contemporary dance to the international stage, while bridging Chinese and overseas cultures through artistic exchange. Themed ‘Time Fantasy’ this year, the CCDF 2026 soars higher than ever, bringing in more talents from different countries than any previous iteration to put on 18 original contemporary dance pieces that tackle the slippery concepts of time, reality, dreams, memories, and prophecies.
CCDF’s festival and programme director Karen Cheung explains by asking if we have ever seen, smelt, or tasted something that triggered a memory, or suddenly had a flash of imagination at what the future might hold. Most of us definitely have. “We are always anchored at a single point, but that point is constantly in motion and always shifting. Time connects our past and our future,” she expands.
A great example of CCDC exploring how we don’t view our world through a single, static lens lies in their double-bill showcase ‘The Connected Stage’ Series: Kylián and Sangba, where a classic work by Czech choreographer Jiří Kylián is paired with the world premiere of a new dance piece by CCDC’s artistic director Sang Jijia. Aside from the past and future overlapping in dance, the Chinese name of Sang’s a|ch is ‘dié jǐng’ 疊景, which literally means to superimpose, the layering of one point of view over another.
Sang freely admits he has always wanted to stage Kylián’s work but just never had the chance to do so selfishly until now. He recalls seeing a performance by Kylián featuring a large three-legged frame or table with a piano on it and thinking it was very striking. “Later, when I needed props in my own work involving stacked set pieces, I thought about using those little triangular tripod stands found inside pizza boxes!” he laughs. “My design eventually evolved, but on a subconscious level I was already in dialogue with Kylián’s work.”
Normally, an audience views a performance from a flat, frontal perspective. So with the use of a top cam, Sang captures angles that viewers can’t normally see from their seats and projects them live – but he also plays around with time, such as extracting two seconds from every 10 seconds in the video feed, for instance. This results in a jumping effect or moments when the dancers’ actions aren’t shown in the projection. Sang is interested in the questions this might raise: Will the audience notice the disappearances, and where do they think the missing sections have gone?
Instead of a surreal concept of time and space, a|ch – pronounced “ach” like the German exclamation, as Sang had spent a number of years with the Ballet Frankfurt – is supposed to reflect our urban living environment, zooming in from a city-wide view into something more intimate and considered. Just as there are plenty of distractions in life, the stage holds many props, but Sang means to ask: Amongst all this clutter, what details do we focus on? What are city dwellers thinking about? How do individuals uniquely stand out within a crowd?
Aside from this stunning closing feature performance, the CCDF 2026 brings plenty of other fascinating events to the programme. The opening show is May B, a classic work featuring 10 dancers covered in white clay, created over 40 years ago that is still being performed today. This is juxtaposed by the festival’s Hotpot East Asia Dance Platform, which showcases how younger generations of dancers view the world and create ideas – 14 original works from across Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, and South Korea sit at this year’s Hotpot table.
Tickets to CCDF 2026 are now available on art-mate and Urbtix. Entry to single performances or group Hotpot showcases can be obtained from $260 to $450, but festival passes make it much easier to not miss anything. The CCDF Pass costs $1,600 while the Hotpot Pass is $1,200 – both passes include access to the Kylián and Sangba closing performance.
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