Review: Wing Chun, Shenzhen Opera & Dance Theatre ★★★★★

Wing Chun is a 300-year-old form of kung fu from Southern China, characterised by its close-quarter, rapid fire style. While we may not know too much about its origins, surely many of us are familiar with, or have a least heard of Bruce Lee, the Hong Kong American actor and martial arts fighter whose cinema and TV films were immensely popular in the 1960s and 70s.

Bruce Lee was trained in Hong Kong by the Grandmaster Yip Man – and Yip Man is the focus of the visually stunning and often engrossing dance drama Wing Chun, performed by Shenzhen Opera and Dance Theatre, which seamlessly blends traditional Chinese movement and contemporary dance.

Two plots run in parallel, occasionally merging: in the first, a 1990s Chinese film crew is making the film Wing Chun; the second goes back to bustling 1950s Hong Kong where Yip Man has moved from rural China.

Two dozen excellent performers, all highly trained dancers and proficient in Wing Chun, bring the two stories to life in scenes that shift smoothly between film studio and the crowded streets of Hong Kong, where we meet the denizens of The House of 72 Tenants, thanks to Hu Yanjun’s detailed and evocative sets that shift easily without breaking the action.

We follow two central characters: Yip Man himself, played with mesmerising presence and dignity by company principal dancer Chang Hongji, and Da Chun (played by the very engaging Feng Haoran), a young lighting technician with the film crew, who teaches himself Wing Chun by practicing with a wooden dummy.

As well as telling their stories, Wing Chun, created by Feng Shuangbai, and choreographed and directed by Han Zhen and Zhou Liya, aims to impart the central philosophy of this particular martial art: ‘an art, a thought, a philosophy and an attitude, as well as a way of life.’

And in a very ‘people’s republic’ kind of way, the show is also keen to be seen as ‘a tribute to the ordinary people chasing their dreams’.

Individual sections are entrancing, none more so than the fight scenes.The first, some 25 minutes into the first half, shows Yip Man single-handedly fighting and defeating four hooligans in the streets of Hong Kong, his lethal speed and lightness beautiful to watch.

And the prolonged class in Yip Man’s Hong Kong Academy that opens Act II and demonstrates a variety of martial arts which Yip Man would merge into one discipline, is thrilling.

A ballet set in rural Foshan, where Yip Man’s sick wife Wing Sing (the willowy and tremendously expressive Xu Tianhui), returns, is like an oasis of serene beauty: in a rice paddy, a group of women in fitted terracotta tunics and grey pants, with conical straw hats, perform a gentle, harmonious dance, while Wing Sing gradually fades in the distance.

The only problem I had with this show was its uneven pacing, which at times dragged. Yang Fan’s cinematic musical score framed the plot expertly; but the Sadler’s Wells sound system with its uncomfortable over-amplification, continues to present a problem.

Minor quibbles, though.