Curator：Elysa WENDI

Jumping Frames Time Machine: Revisiting the Inaugural Impulse

Twenty-one years after Jumping Frames first emerged, these four works from 2004 resurface as unintentional time machines—artifacts that transport us not just to Hong Kong’s past, but to the festival’s own genesis. Returning to these early experiments reveals how intuitive the pioneering spirit was, and how these early explorations laid the groundwork for the collaborative alchemy between dance artists and video makers that would propel the festival for decades to come.

Alienation offers the most visceral time machine experience, preserving Hong Kong’s 2004 cityscape through Yuri Ng’s frantic urban wandering across familiar yet disorienting terrain. The film speaks to alienation as both intimate wound and urban condition—one that has only deepened in the intervening decades. Ambiguity unfolds as wordless dialogue between two bodies navigating abandoned architecture, triggering a haunting sense of relational precarity. dancescape@margin@beijing confronts the anxiety of living in a loop within repetitive and mundane environments—a meditation on authenticity and belonging. Finally, 10 Nights Rehearsal Note captures a body suspended in temporal limbo, where the abandoned campus becomes a repository for institutional memory, personal and collective histories converging in fragments.

These works remind us that time machines don’t merely transport us backward; they illuminate how past and present intermingle, how yesterday’s gestures continue to reverberate through today’s bodies. The dancers captured in 2004 persist in motion across two decades of festival programming, their movements echoing through time. In revisiting these inaugural impulses, we discover not nostalgia but the enduring relevance of questions about identity, space, and temporal experience—questions rendered visible through bodies in motion and time-based media.

Allenation

A thirty-something midlife crisis unfolds as a frantic escapade in a city that appears both familiar and disorienting. In an effort to escape from himself, the urban dweller portrayed by dance artist Yuri Ng, attempts to break all physical and metaphysical boundaries by wandering around the city in the most unconventional manner. The film acts as a time machine, transporting us back to the cityscape of Hong Kong in 2004, conjuring an alienated universe created by the renowned French video artist Seba Lallemand.

Directors

Jean-Sébastien LALLEMAND

2004 / 18’18 / No Dialogue

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Ambiguity

Dance artists Mui and Wai Mei took an improvisation journey through an abandoned mansion with the cinematographer, starting an intuitive dialogue with the space, sound and the ambience. Full of obscurity, their performance symbolised the ambiguity and ambivalence of interpersonal relationships.

Directors / Choreographers / Performers

MUI Cheuk Yin / YEUNG Wai Mei

2004 / 10’40 / No Dialogue

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dancescape@margin@beijing

Life is a repetitive cycle of daily routines, reading stories reprinted in newspapers, feeling disoriented among identical cookie-cutter buildings… losing track of one’s existence, or perhaps, being pushed towards the margin, far from reality.

Beijing—is the homeland, yet alienated. Our romanticized metropolis is their place of refuge. We, who gaze from afar, and they, who live there up close, belong to two different worlds, and yet… Everything feels strangely familiar.

Directors

Winnie FU / Franky LUNG

Choreographers

LI Hanzhong / MA Bo

2024 / 9’43 / No Dialogue

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10 Nights Rehearsal Note

A fragment of familiar memories is found, misplaced in an abandoned campus, where a shaken body recklessly flees to escape. She is trapped in time, before she could run away.

Director / Choreographer

ONG Yong Lock

Director
NG Siu Fat

Performer

Liz Tsui

2004 / 4’24 / No Dialogue

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