- * The 'Artistic Internship Scheme' is supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council
- # The 'Arts Administration Internship Scheme' and The 'Arts Production Internship Scheme' are supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council
- ^ The ‘Arts Talents Internship Matching Programme’ is supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council
- " Part-time
Born in Malaysia, Ong Yong Lock is now a choreographer, a performer, and an educator. Ong is a founder member of South 'ASLI' Dance Workshop (SADW) and served as the Artistic Director between 1997 and 2001. In 2002, Ong founded the Unlock Dancing Plaza with Elsie Chau. He had been the Artistic Director for almost two decades since its establishment in 2002 and has been dedicated to promoting and popularizing of modern dance. In 2022, he has taken on the role Creative Director (Public Engagement), focusing on outreach and community projects.
Ong joined the Hong Kong Dance Company and the City Contemporary Dance Company in 1989 and 1993 respectively. In 1998 , Ong joined the Expressions Dance Company in Brisbane (Australia) to perform in Brisbane Festival. In the same year, he was invited to teach modern dance in Japan and Malaysia as well as choreographed for the 19th Chinese Dance Festival in Malaysia. In 2000, Ong was invited to perform in the East Dragon Dance Festival and World Dance in Japan. In 2002, he won the “Hong Kong Dance Awards” presented by The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in recognition of his lithe choreography of ballet 4 In. Since then, he has been appointed as an art advisor of dance by Hong Kong Arts Development Council. He was also the recipient of the “Award for Best Artist (Dance)” from the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards 2014.
Ong is active in choreography. His works were featured in Asian Art Festival, International Sino Dance Week, Malaysian Chinese Dance Festival, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Hong Kong Dance Festival and 20th International Academy of Dance Festival. He had rich experiences of working in partnership with a wide range of organizations such as Hong Kong Dance Company, City Contemporary Dance Company, Beijing Dance/LDTX, Guangdong Modern Dance Company, Xiamen Modern Dance, The Hong Kong Ballet, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and The Queensland University of Technology. Ong's highly acclaimed full-length works include 10 Nights' Wanderings, Whispering of Love, Love Sick, Kung Fu and Tofu, Chopin VS CA, Walls 44 and Wanderer. In particular, Wanderer received "Outstanding Achievement in Independent Production" at Hong Kong Dance Awards 2015.
In recent years, Ong has been actively promoting #DANCELESS community engagement project and creates a series of works which encourage public participation in dance. #DANCELESS 03 – bolero is a success which has been invited to perform in different international dance festivals. At present, over 200 public participants have taken part in it.
Photography: eddielilil @tinysotiny.co
Joseph Lee is a choreographer, performer, and performance curator. Lee graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and completed a Master of Arts in Contemporary Dance at London Contemporary Dance School and was appointed as the Artistic Director of Unlock Dancing Plaza in 2022.
Lee’s work focuses on the unheralded aspects of the local contemporary dance culture, such as the production, storage, and dissemination of knowledge in the creative process, the dialogue between cross-cultural contexts and cross-artistic mediums, and the modes of physical creativity in community practice, resulting in a series of contemporary dance performances and exchange platforms, which include residency-based dance festivals #DANCELESS complex, local research and development accompaniment program dance-to-be, and Unlock Body Lab: Open Research Week of the co-learning platform, etc., in an attempt to broaden the creation perspective on the body as the main medium.
Lee’s creation mediums involve live performance, video, writing, and curation. Lee uses creation to understand the significance of dance in the contemporary context, specializing in deconstructing the presentation and nature of the body, imagery, and symbols at different levels, and redefining and refocusing the performativity of the work through performance. Based on the audience's perception, the works deliberately create various kinds of dislocations, conflicts, or modulations beyond expectations, to guide the external viewing experience back to its introspection.
Lee is active in creating works around pop culture, symbols and representation, physical movement, and the overlap and gap between dance and its images. For example, Emo Coaster (2024-) explores the connection between pop music and dance, understanding the artificially constructed meanings and emotional expressions, as well as the relationship between one's private emotions and popular culture; the series of Slow Dance (2023-) extends and lengthens almost indefinitely the smooth, rhythmic, and coherent dynamics of traditional performances. It reverses the temporal nature of dance, gradually transforming it into a seemingly familiar yet unfamiliar form of performance. A series of works that reorganize language, symbols, and body image include Folding Echoes (2016), Unfolding Images: We Are Spectacles (2021), and this work has three possible titles: (2023). Video works include It Tastes Like You (2016), Two Solos, One Dance, Three Frames (2021), and the series of Slow Dance (Zoomed In) (2024) with video director Kitty Yeung.
Lee’s works have been toured in the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was one of the collective members of the International Contemporary Dance Collective (iCoDaCo) between 2018 and 2020. He co-created a dance piece it will come later (2018) and toured with five European choreographers.
Lee is the recipient of the Award for Young Artist presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2017.
Photography: eddielilil @tinysotiny.co