Opening Film: Jumping Frames Time Machine

Twenty-one years after Jumping Frames first emerged, these four works from 2004 resurface as unintentional time machines—artifacts that transport us not just to Hong Kong’s past, but to the festival’s own genesis. Returning to these early experiments reveals how intuitive the pioneering spirit was, and how these early explorations laid the groundwork for the collaborative alchemy between dance artists and video makers that would propel the festival for decades to come.

Alienation offers the most visceral time machine experience, preserving Hong Kong’s 2004 cityscape through Yuri Ng’s frantic urban wandering across familiar yet disorienting terrain. The film speaks to alienation as both intimate wound and urban condition—one that has only deepened in the intervening decades. Ambiguity unfolds as wordless dialogue between two bodies navigating abandoned architecture, triggering a haunting sense of relational precarity. dancescape@margin@beijing confronts the anxiety of living in a loop within repetitive and mundane environments—a meditation on authenticity and belonging. Finally, 10 Nights Rehearsal Note captures a body suspended in temporal limbo, where the abandoned campus becomes a repository for institutional memory, personal and collective histories converging in fragments.

These works remind us that time machines don’t merely transport us backward; they illuminate how past and present intermingle, how yesterday’s gestures continue to reverberate through today’s bodies. The dancers captured in 2004 persist in motion across two decades of festival programming, their movements echoing through time. In revisiting these inaugural impulses, we discover not nostalgia but the enduring relevance of questions about identity, space, and temporal experience—questions rendered visible through bodies in motion and time-based media.