Joseph Lee is a choreographer, performer, and performance curator. Lee graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and completed a Master of Arts in Contemporary Dance at London Contemporary Dance School and was appointed as the Artistic Director of Unlock Dancing Plaza in 2022. 

Lee’s work focuses on the unheralded aspects of the local contemporary dance culture, such as the production, storage, and dissemination of knowledge in the creative process, the dialogue between cross-cultural contexts and cross-artistic mediums, and the modes of physical creativity in community practice, resulting in a series of contemporary dance performances and exchange platforms, which include residency-based dance festivals #DANCELESS complex, local research and development accompaniment program dance-to-be, and Unlock Body Lab: Open Research Week of the co-learning platform, etc., in an attempt to broaden the creation perspective on the body as the main medium. 

Lee’s creation mediums involve live performance, video, writing, and curation. Lee uses creation to understand the significance of dance in the contemporary context, specializing in deconstructing the presentation and nature of the body, imagery, and symbols at different levels, and redefining and refocusing the performativity of the work through performance. Based on the audience's perception, the works deliberately create various kinds of dislocations, conflicts, or modulations beyond expectations, to guide the external viewing experience back to its introspection. 

Lee is active in creating works around pop culture, symbols and representation, physical movement, and the overlap and gap between dance and its images. For example, Emo Coaster (2024-) explores the connection between pop music and dance, understanding the artificially constructed meanings and emotional expressions, as well as the relationship between one's private emotions and popular culture; the series of Slow Dance (2023-) extends and lengthens almost indefinitely the smooth, rhythmic, and coherent dynamics of traditional performances. It reverses the temporal nature of dance, gradually transforming it into a seemingly familiar yet unfamiliar form of performance. A series of works that reorganize language, symbols, and body image include Folding Echoes (2016), Unfolding Images: We Are Spectacles (2021), and this work has three possible titles: (2023). Video works include It Tastes Like You (2016), Two Solos, One Dance, Three Frames (2021), and the series of Slow Dance (Zoomed In) (2024) with video director Kitty Yeung. 

Lee’s works have been toured in the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was one of the collective members of the International Contemporary Dance Collective (iCoDaCo) between 2018 and 2020. He co-created a dance piece it will come later (2018) and toured with five European choreographers. 

Lee is the recipient of the Award for Young Artist presented by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council in 2017. 

Photography: eddielilil @tinysotiny.co

Credit: Unlock Dancing Plaza.

Claire Cunningham is a performer and creator of multi-disciplinary performance based in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the UK’s most acclaimed and internationally renowned disabled artists, Cunningham’s work is often rooted in the study and use/misuse of her crutches and the exploration of the potential of her own specific physicality with a conscious rejection of traditional dance techniques (developed for non-disabled bodies).  This runs alongside a deep interest in the lived experience of disability and its implications not only as a choreographer but also in terms of societal notions of knowledge, value, connection and interdependence.

 A self-identifying disabled artist, Cunningham’s work combines multiple art forms, including performance works:  ME (Mobile/Evolution);  12 made for Candoco Dance company;   Give Me a Reason to Live; Guide Gods, and the duet The Way You Look (at me) Tonight with choreographer Jess Curtis which was selected for the 2018 Tanzplatform in Germany and was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award.  Claire’s ensemble piece, Thank You Very Much won CATS awards for Best Ensemble and Best Sound and Music and was the inspiration for the Radio 4 programme, Elvis - A Tribute in Dance.  

In 2019, Claire created her first piece for gallery spaces, taking part in Automatise Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, curated by Amanda Cachia for Owen’s Art Gallery, Sackville, Canada. In 2020, Claire collaborated with scholar and activist Julia Watts Belser on audio works Quanimacy commissioned by The Place, London and We Run Like Rivers for Theaterformen Festival, Hannover.  In 2021, Claire was honored for her Outstanding Artistic Development in dance at the German Dance Awards.

Photo credit: Unlimited, UK