Event by Springboad Performance

Springboard Performance presents HUNG DANCE’s BIRDY in Calgary on November 26, with a subsequent presentation at Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity on November 28, as part of a regional collaboration connecting audiences and artists across Southern Alberta.

Birdy | Hung Dance (Taiwan)

Creatures of a feather dance together in Birdy, Hung Dance’s call to the wild.

Employing a headpiece called “Ling Zi,” incorporating pheasant tail feathers traditionally worn in Chinese opera to signify warrior power and skill, Birdy conjures a magpie-like creature, transforming bright bursts of freedom against the weighted cage of history.

Founded in 2017 by choreographer Lai Hung-Chung, Hung Dance’s choreographic vocabulary draws from martial arts, Peking opera, and traditional cultural symbols. Through the prism of performance, Taiwan’s complex history and political status metamorphose into a thrilling new dance language.

The calligraphic eloquence of four-foot-long feathers moves from gentleness to violence, transforming into spears, whips, and blades. Whether extending the body into space, wriggling in earnest writing, or offering a gossamer caress, the feathers become a form of punctuation leading, interrupting and echoing movement phrases with the expressive vitality of living things.

As the dancers flock together in rippling patterns of conformity and divergence, rituals of behaviour observed in the non-human world find their choreographic counterparts. Birdy blends contemporary dance and Tai Chi, bringing traditional and contemporary movement, music and imagery into a dynamic tension between inheritance and transformation. What emerges is a universal cry for freedom.



“Birdy, a sublime choreography.” - Youness Bousenna, La Provence

“In Birdy, LAI Hung-chung explores the limits of our desires and our sense of freedom.”

- Jade Enaud, Zone Critique

“...dancers, each adorned with a long pheasant feather, form tableaux expressing a longing for flight. And the magic of Birdy takes hold.”

- Ariane Bavelier, Le Figaro