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Performing arts in Hong Kong
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Review | British dance company’s Double Murder programme, part of Hong Kong’s New Vision Arts Festival, shows once again that the devil has the best tunes

  • The Hofesh Shechter Company’s Double Murder dance programme in Hong Kong contrasts the nightmarish Clowns with the gentler The Fix
  • Clowns is brilliantly imagined and starkly powerful, featuring wild sequences of chaos and increasing violence that make The Fix feel simply anticlimactic

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A scene from “The Fix”, part of the “Double Murder” double-bill dance programme from Britain’s Hofesh Schechter Company in Hong Kong. Photo: LCSD
Natasha Rogai

Britain’s Hofesh Shechter Company returns to Hong Kong for the first time since 2014 with the much-heralded double-bill programme “Double Murder”.

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The programme, part of the New Vision Arts Festival, pairs two dance pieces designed to portray visions of hell and heaven, respectively.

In this case, it’s the devil who has all the best tunes.

The nightmarish Clowns is brilliantly imagined and starkly powerful, while The Fix, intended to counteract the darkness of its companion piece, is more anticlimax than antidote.

A scene from “Clowns”. Photo: Hofesh Shechter Company
A scene from “Clowns”. Photo: Hofesh Shechter Company

Created in 2018, Clowns explores how we have become desensitised to violence and see it as mere entertainment, through constant exposure to video games, movies or even news coverage. Hofesh Shechter, the dance company’s founder, is British-Israeli and the current events in his birth country make this theme particularly relevant today.

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