“The most amazing Chinese choreographer.”
Such is the assessment of Helen Lai by Taiwanese dance artist Lin Hwai-min that we often hear about. How it has stirred many imaginations—how much do we know about Helen Lai? How many of her works have we seen, and what do we remember? What kind of lyrical gesture did she respond to the world at a time when we had never met?
Born into a family rooted in the arts, Lai studied ballet in Hong Kong. Her career began as a dancer with TVB and the Hong Kong Ballet for All. After studying at the London Contemporary Dance School, she returned to Hong Kong to dance and choreograph for Rediffusion Television and the Hong Kong Ballet for All. Participated in the founding of the Hong Kong City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC), she was its Artistic Director from 1985 to 1989; travelled overseas in 1990 and returned to Hong Kong as CCDC’s Resident Choreographer in 1991, until stepping down in 2011. In addition, she has choreographed for several local arts groups and institutions, including Hong Kong Dance Company, Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, Hong Kong Ballet, DanceArt HK, Y-Space, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Hong Kong Arts Festival, and more. She is also closely associated with overseas groups, whose partners include Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, Taipei Crossover Dance Company, Guangdong Experimental Modern Dance Company, Contempodanza and Ballet Estudio in Mexico City, and Singapore Dance Theatre, among others.
Starting in 2022, I began to create the Helen Lai Dance Archive (the Archive), which aims to collect the archives of Helen Lai’s dance creations from the 1980s for the public as digital archives. With the consent of Helen Lai, a donation from the CCDC, and support from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library, I began serving as the archive curator and gradually organizing the CCDC archives, with great help from many friends during the process. In the beginning, we aimed to sort through all the materials related to Lai in CCDC’s huge company collection, applying a process of listing, recording and studying. However, different file types, quantities, and storage methods differ from time to time, and archiving can only be built slowly based on clarifying the nature and forms of the files. In addition to ensuring the Archive is functional, we ponder how the archival materials of the performing arts can respond to the live body present on stage. How can fragments of evidence restore a glimpse of the fleeting moment? What materials need to be saved and what items must go? What materials have already been scattered and what have been hidden due to personnel changes?
Therefore, we have finally established that the Archive should not only present the works of Lai herself, such as house programmes, photographs, videos, notes, and reviews but should also include materials that can explain the process of the dance production, including technical notes, stage, costumes, props, lighting, design and operation records. There is no doubt that the archives of the technical department will provide important evidence for our restoration of the time-space and socio-cultural context of Lai’s works. At the same time, these technical archives will be a narrative on the professionalism and collective spirit of Hong Kong theatre production.
The information is now available to readers as part of the first phase of the entire archival research program, which has included 22 Lai’s works from 1980 to 1985 in CCDC, totalling more than five hundred entries, and continued to be made available to the public at the beginning of 2025. Among them, Helen Lai tried to establish her own aesthetic vocabulary by creating a wealth of short dance pieces, and a large-scale dance drama in collaboration with CCDC witnessed the journey of the first local modern choreographers to trace and recreate cultural China.
Due to copyright restrictions, valuable dance recordings can only be viewed by researchers on campus. In addition, we have compiled an index for digitized newspaper journals for users who contact the Library’s Special Collections to request a reading.
Dr. DONG Xianliang
Helen Lai Dance Archive Curator
(Translated by Br. William Ng OFM)
