Curated by Timmy Chih-Ting Chen

How do we collectively survive in a world increasingly saddening, polarized, and militarized? How can we cultivate joy, connection, and creativity through the collaborative, playful acts of dancing?  These dancing films offer an interconnected, conversational response through the transformative power of (inter)play—entangling bodies, plants, animals, things, cities, and systems in unexpected ways. Across rain-soaked floors, lush ecosystems, urban landscapes, and virtual worlds, dance emerges as a tool for survival—reimagining agency, dissolving boundaries, and forging relationships rooted in care and sustainability. 

Through their playful experimentation, the artists explore themes of ecological entanglements, creative rebellion, and the enduring strength of friendship. At the heart of these works lies a spirit of interconnectivity and resistance. Whether it’s dancers embodying the movements of plants and objects, two girls and a cowboy cat contemplating mortality and temporality, or a performer reclaiming her body from the control of a first-person player, each film challenges the systems—both visible and invisible—that shape our everyday lives.  Playful Entanglements celebrates dance films as radical acts of reimagining ways to resist, connect, and care for a world that often feels fractured.  In these moments of movement and collaboration, we are reminded that play is not frivolous, but a vital force for survival, transformation, and mutual care.

Once Upon A Time In Rain

Once Upon A Time In Rain revisits a fleeting moment inspired by Self-Portrait with Three Women (Zhang Mengqi, 2010) from 12 years ago at a documentary youth training camp on Cheung Chau Island of Hong Kong. Performer-director Shing moves across rain-soaked floors, his movements shaped by the collective vision of fellow filmmakers like Chan Hau-chun, Chui Chi-yin, Fai Wan. A playful exploration of creative impulse and collective filmmaking, the work dissolves boundaries between agency and surrender, shared pleasure and private pain. 

Director / Lee Wai Shing
2025 / 7’43 / Cantonese

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Collection of Expressive Sight part II

The second instalment in Collection of Expressive Sight, a series of five non-anthropocentric ecological dance films, unfolds in the lush landscapes of Guangzhou. Here, dancers transform their bodies, mirroring the shapes of plants and forging intimate connections with their botanical counterparts. Through this lyrical interplay, the film evokes a world of mutual becoming, where bodies and plants entwine in delicate cosmic choreography, gesturing toward ecological entanglements, blurring the boundaries between human and nonhuman.

Director / Wu Hui
2025 / 9’43

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Kill Tick

In this whimsical and thought-provoking dreamcore fantasy, Kill Tick, two female dancer-directors and a cowboy cat navigate the passage of time, the lightness of memories, and the inevitability of death, while immersed in the colorful backdrop of TV series, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Blending playful absurdity with existential musings, the film crescendos in a rap rhapsody, where fun and friendship becomes acts of resistance against the world that is falling apart.

Director / Li Shiyu, Xia Yifan
2025 / 13’16

Bodyscope Dance Film Festival-Short Dance Film
Manifest Dance-Film Festival-Student Dance-Film

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All things wise and wonderful

Conceived as a duo-channel performance video installation, All things wise and wonderful reimagines Hong Kong through the lens of animism, imbuing inanimate objects in the city with dancing souls. Calendars, traffic cones, street signs, architectural forms, surveillance cameras, fire hydrants, and passing pedestrians transform into both dancing partners and silent witnesses, moving in rhythm with the dancer-director to tell the story of a changing city.

Director / Vivian Wing Lam Wong
2024 / 22’48

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Manipulated Emotions

Manipulated Emotions unfolds as a dance film in the guise of a video game, where the dancer’s costumes, emotions, and movements are controlled by the visible hands of a first-person player wielding the game console. The dancer ultimately reclaims control of her body and agency in a powerful “game over” that subverts the system itself.

Director / Zhang Yutong, Wang Xinpei

2024 / 4’34