M+ Live Art x HK Ballet:
Museum, Dance, and Climate Change
M+ Live Art x HK Ballet:
Museum, Dance, and Climate Change
This talk explores the urgent themes related to ecology, sustainability, and climate change that animate the online festival M+ Live Art x Hong Kong Ballet: Beyond Carbon. Join Doryun Chong, M+ Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator; Septime Webre, Artistic Director of Hong Kong Ballet; and Debra Tan, global thought leader on climate and water risks and Director and Head at CWR, as they unpack the background of the collaboration and discuss the responsibility cultural institutions have to bring public attention to critical issues.
As the first global museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong, M+ intends to build a platform for dialogues on issues of social and cultural concern. Hong Kong Ballet is known for updating a heritage artform to connect with contemporary audiences. The discussion sheds light on how aesthetic forms including architecture and dance can promote public knowledge about environmental emergencies and the collaboration as a dialogue between artistic endeavors and scientific research.
This free online event will be held in English, with simultaneous interpretation in Cantonese. Click on 'Register' to sign up and receive the Zoom meeting link via email.
About the Speakers
Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, oversees all curatorial activities and programmes at M+, including acquisitions, exhibitions, learning and public programmes, and digital initiatives encompassing the museum’s three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art, as well as the thematic area of Hong Kong visual culture. Since joining M+ as the inaugural Chief Curator in 2013, Chong has led the transformative growth of the M+ Collections and steered the curatorial direction and pedagogical practices of the museum’s exhibitions and programmes to foreground the transcultural and transnational narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture.
Portrait of Doryun Chong
Septime Webre, Artistic Director at Hong Kong Ballet (HKB), is an internationally recognised ballet director, choreographer, educator and advocate. He joined HKB as Artistic Director in July 2017 after seventeen years as Artistic Director of The Washington Ballet (US) from 1999 to 2016, and six years as Artistic Director for the American Repertory Ballet in Princeton (US) from 1993 to 1999. Much sought-after as a choreographer, Webre’s works appear in the repertoires of ballet companies globally. Webre’s new works for HKB, Romeo + Juliet, set in 1960s Hong Kong, and The Nutcracker, set in early twentieth century Hong Kong, world premiered in June and December 2021, respectively.
Portrait of Septime Webre
Debra Tan, Director and Head of CWR, built the organisation from an idea into a 'go-to' resource in the global climate water risk conversation. Tan has written reports that were ground-breaking and instrumental in understanding not just China's but future global water challenges. They are widely cited by the media and in the finance sector. Tan has been published by SpringerNature, Palgrave MacMillan, and China policy journals. She is also a contributing author to the latest IPCC report Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Tan sits on committees including CDP, CDSB (now IFRS), MNCs, and judges the UNPRI awards. Before CWR, Tan spent over a decade in finance and shares the concern to the water crisis caused by the melting of the Himalayan glaciers.
Portrait of Debra Tan
Image at top: Osmosis by Leung Chunlong. Dancers (from the left): Gouta Seki, Leung Saulong. Photography: Keith Hiro. Photo: Courtesy of Hong Kong Ballet