Artistic Mission
“I strongly believe performing arts can heal inner wounds and mend souls. I hope my works will give the audience a shot in the arm.”
Kelvin Mak,
Founder and Artistic Director of BDT
STAY BOLD to take on challenges, think big, explore the unexplored, and uphold artistic integrity.
STAY FOCUSED on professional dance techniques, multilayered emotions, and simple stage aesthetics to expound relatable and intriguing life stories, bringing unique and high standard theater experiences to the audience, leading them to tap into and expand their spiritual realm.
STAY CURIOUS and keep intervening and pondering reality. By examining and portraying human nature, we create space for the audience to resonate, reflect and get inspired.
“The works involve emotional depth and layers, bringing out a profound human dimension. Such extraordinary maturity, as well as the courage and skill to tackle important issues, is rarely seen among young artists…The works come with originality, strength, and entertainment, and can connect with a broad audience.”
Hong Kong Alliance
Our unique artistic style and performance techniques set us apart in Hong Kong’s modern dance field. Theater and dramatic elements and stage imagery are important ingredients of our works. We invest a lot of time in devising, and throughout the process we repeatedly research, experiment, reflect, and improve techniques to create strong theater characters and emotional changes for our dance.
In addition, we are the only performing arts group in Hong Kong which embraces a persistent commitment to collaborate with young artists from diverse backgrounds such as ballet, Chinese dance, hip-hop, pole dance, drama, etc. Possessing extraordinary physical ability and energy, all these professional performers have had outstanding achievements and won many awards in their fields. By interweaving different movement techniques through cross-disciplinary cooperation, we develop and inject new movement vocabulary that makes our works more contemporary, expressive and appealing. At the same time, our performance style also helps expand the horizons of contemporary dance audiences.
In terms of dance movements, unique, difficult, dynamic, smooth and neat pas de deux and trio have become our hallmarks. During the rehearsal process, bodies from different dance backgrounds constantly collide, experiment and blend to generate scenes of exciting lifting and shifting movements that are rarely seen in other contemporary dance performances. In addition, what sets us apart from other small and medium-sized dance groups in Hong Kong is our powerful group dance. Except for the three large dance groups in Hong Kong, few professional group dance performances involve more than 6 people which are our characteristic. Through the clever use of stage space and dynamic formations, we continue to explore and develop possibilities of dance composition and scenes.
We insist on adopting simple stage aesthetics. By using stage space, rich movement vocabulary, multilayered contextual meanings, and strong theater lighting and sound effects, we create scenes that are intriguing and full of dramatic tension.
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ABOUT THE COMPANY
Founded in 2017 by Hong Kong arts professionals, Beyond Dance Theater (BDT) is a relatively young and highly creative self-funded arts group in Hong Kong. Committed to the development of contemporary dance, it focuses on fostering dance theater and cross-disciplinary performance platforms, as well as promoting Asian arts talents and creations to the world by leveraging the founder’s overseas network.
"This arts group has a great vision and is very clear about its own direction...One creation after another despite the lack of funding support. For a long time Hong Kong has not seen a small and medium-sized arts group with such strength. It is worth noting."
William W.Y. Chan,
Hong Kong arts critic
Led by Kelvin Mak Cheuk Hung, BDT’s founder and artistic director, in just a few years, we have grown from a small arts group into a medium-sized arts group comprising two companies (BDT 1 and BDT 2). Despite funding constraints, we have persevered in producing creative works of different scales and forms. As one of the few arts group in Hong Kong which can develop sustainably at scale, we have gained strong recognition for our creativity and performance from the industry and a broad and diverse audience.
"I dare say, as long as they hold firm to their core purpose and belief in the power of art and dance, they will achieve very good development in the next ten years. It is a blessing for the Hong Kong audience to see such high-quality productions."
Kuh Fei,
Hong Kong arts critic
Today, we have become one of the most influential arts groups in Hong Kong producing world-class and highly regarded works. At the recent “Hong Kong Dance Awards 2022”, we were nominated for five awards along with the three large government-funded dance companies, and Kelvin and his work “Remnants” were named “Tom Brown Emerging Choreographer” and “Outstanding Medium Venue Production” respectively.
