24-hour dance festival to wow Hong Kong, from parkour to ballet

New York’s famed Sleep No More pushed the boundaries of performance, with the Macbeth story played out to an audience spread across multiple rooms and levels of three warehouses on West 27th Street. Following the trend for site-specific performances, a French curator is bringing a 24-hour dance festival to various venues at the Eaton Hotel, in Jordan.

In 24 Hours in Movement: Pegged Legs, Hooked Hands, live performances by more than 40 artists from Hong Kong and overseas will be spread across an entire day’s programme in the hotel’s lobby, restaurants, rooftop swimming pool, ballroom, escalators and even the bedrooms.

“It will be a fun experience that people can join on and off, or stay for as long as they want. It’s centred on performing art, but also takes inspiration from literature,” says Alice Rensy, a producer, dancer and dance teacher who is behind the event. “Through this festival we reinterpret ‘movement’ […] bringing awareness to ordinarily unnoticed gestures, spaces, people, society, humanity and beyond.”

Linking themes of fragility and imperfection, the festival name alludes to the novels Moby Dick and Pereira Maintains, excerpts of which will be read in the dark by an actor as a kind of “visual reset” in an optically stimulating day, Rensy says.

Elsewhere, there will be performances by the Hong Kong Ballet, a Cantonese opera, kung fu-inspired acrobatics from local group TS Crew, breakdancing demonstrations, apsara dance from Prumsodun Ok and Cambodia’s first all-male gay troupe, Natyarasa, a street-dancing showdown, parkour stunts, screened pieces by German choreographer Raimund Hoghe, and a late-night party where everyone can dance.