✭✭✭✭✩

choreographed and directed by Han Zhen & Zhou Liya, music by Yang Fan

Shenzhen Opera and Dance Theatre with TO Live, ADEM and the Canada-China Cultural Development Association, Meridian Hall, 1 Front Street East, Toronto

December 16, 2025-January 4, 2026

“Be like water, flowing and adapting” (Bruce Lee)

Toronto is the site for the North American premiere of the Shenzhen Opera and Dance Theatre’s Wing Chun Dance Drama on its world tour. The dance work focusses on the life of Ip Man 葉問 (1893-1972), also known as Yip Man, a grandmaster of the martial art of Wing Chun 詠春, who brought the discipline from China to Hong Kong whence it spread to the rest of the world. The production itself is gorgeous, but the storytelling is uneven. Still, the highs of the work are so spectacular that lovers of dance and martial arts will not want to miss the show.

Wing Chun is a form of Southern Chinese Kung Fu used for defense in close quarters. Yip Man, looking for better opportunities, left his native Foshan in Guangdong and moved to Hong Kong, a city renowned for its martial arts academies. His teaching of Weng Chun in Hong Kong made the art more widely known, especially after Bruce Lee (1940-73), Yip’s most famous pupil, went on to make martial arts movies displaying his skill in Wing Chun.

While Wing Chun Dance Drama concentrates on Yip, librettist Feng Shuangbai uses the unusual ploy of imbedding the story of Yip inside two narrative frames. The outermost frame is set in the present and concerns Da Chun, an old employee at the Shenzhen Film Studio. Da Chun happens upon a photo album which includes a photo (projected onto a screen at the back) of the crew who worked on a film about Yip Man in the 1990s.

His memory, thus jogged, takes him back to that film shoot when he was just a young lighting technician. We meet the film’s female director and her staff planning set-ups. When the cameraman starts shooting, an animation of moving sprocket holes appears on either side of the stage along with scratches and dust to show that we are now seeing the film the crew is making. Thus, Wing Chun is imagined as a view of the memory of Da Chun about the filming of a movie about Yip Man, a movie which is presented as if it were a dance drama.

Wing Chun is divided into six acts with an intermission after Act 3. Each act has a title and vague synopsis which appear on electronic title boards on either side of the proscenium. They are labelled with a scene, cut and take number to emphasize the conceit that we are watching a film.

This film set in the 1950s looks very much like a stage play using six two-sided towers to represent the narrow streets of Hong Kong. The outer two sides show the exterior of a building, the inner two sides its interior. The side-titles call the location “The House of 72 Tenants”, a reference to the 1973 Hong Kong film of the same name about people living in a crowded Hong Kong tenement. Into this lively, happy scene walks Yip Man carrying his shingle advertising an academy for Wing Chun.

Yip meets a young woman, Cheung Wing-sing, and they fall in love and marry. In the community when a threesome of street toughs begins intimidating the merchants of the area, Yip steps in and easily defeats them, even though one is wielding a butcher’s knife. This victory makes him a local hero and his soon has a room full of pupils ready to learn Wing Chun. As Yip moves from one success to another, the young Da Chun is more drawn into the story and dreams of being a Wing Chun master himself.

In the staging we see performers in a very uncinematic way push the towers into different configurations to represent various locations. A revolve is also used to let us see the towers and the performers on it from various perspectives. Ren Dongsheng's lighting designs are highly imaginative but also highly theatrical making the “movie” we see look more like a splendid stage spectacle. Of course, the mere fact that all the action in the “movie” is really dance, with frequent use of synchronized movement for the corps, is completely non-naturalistic. We have to wonder whether presenting the story of Yip Man as a “movie” rather than the dance drama it is makes any sense. Yip Man does appear in Hong Kong movies of the 1990s but not as the central character. That does not happen until Wilson Yip’s 2008 film Ip Man, which led to three sequels, and Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster 一代宗师 of 2013. The idea of the 1990s film and the present-day Da Chun are there because the creators wish to signal that Yip Man’s influence continues into the present. Yet, the very existence of Wing Chun Dance Drama already demonstrates that fact obviating the need for the two frames.

A further difficulty is that it is nearly impossible to be interested in the long sequences concerning the Director and her crew. The choreographers give them stylized movements, and the Director is often given balletic outbursts expressing her frustration with getting what she wants. Sometimes we see both the crew and the film actors on stage at the same time which underscores the show’s metatheatricality, but these scenes are also the source of the show’s frequent longueurs and pale in comparison with the impact of the scenes featuring Yip Man. In fact, the librettists and choreographers spend so much time setting up the conceit of a memory of a crew making a film based on history that we start to wonder when the story about Yip will ever begin.

After the long set-up, the dance drama finally becomes involving with two sequences in Act 1. The first is the lovely pas de deux between Yip and Wing-sing that blends both ballet and modern dance. The second is the tense Wing Chun-infused battle between Yip and the three young toughs. The height of the whole dance drama does not arrive until after intermission with Act 4. Here Yip goes before the grandmasters of four already well-established disciplines to prove the power of Wing Chun.

The battles with the masters of Praying Mantis, Baguazhang, Bajiquan and Tai Chi are absolutely breath-taking. The fast-action hand-work and foot-work are so rapid that all we see is a blur. Fortunately, in Yip’s battle with the Praying Mantis master, Yip and the master slip into a slow motion sequence so we can see exactly what is happening. These battles are so exciting I didn’t want to blink. These sequences feel like seeing the combat scenes of films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) or Fearless (2006) performed live.

Wing Chun Dance Drama is an example of stagecraft of the highest order. Stage designer Hu Yanjun makes remarkable use of reconfigurable towers, the revolve and the dropping of curtains in front of the stage picture and back. Lighting designer Ren Dongsheng achieves a wide range of brilliant effects I’ve never seen before. Especially fine is a scene where Da Chun is practicing with a Muk Yan Jong 木人桩 (wooden training dummy) in the foreground and Yip is practicing with one so far upstage we cannot tell whether we are seeing Da Chun’s shadow or the actor playing Yip. Ren gradually shifts the lighting so that we see that it actually is the actor playing Yip and that both actors are making their rapid moves in perfect synchrony.

Yang Donglin’s costumes capture the look of each of the periods of the action from the bright colours and playfulness of the 1950s to the duller hues and straighter lines of the 1990s. One of the most beautiful scenes in the show that seems to have nothing to do with plot occurs in Act 5. We see women in dusky red robes and traditional conical hats spreading out fabric of the same colour and texture and then gathering it into bundles. Only if you read preview articles about the show’s original production in 2022 will you learn that this scene is a celebration of the fabric known as Xiangyunsha 香雲紗. All the costumes have been made of this fabric, a handcrafted silk of ancient origins that is included on China’s cultural heritage list. The use of the same fabric for the costumes of all three periods in the drama is meant to demonstrate their cultural continuity.

The single element that makes Wing Chun Dance Drama a must-see is the sensational performance of Chang Hongli 常宏基 as Yip Man. Not only is he a fantastic dancer but he is a master of Wing Chun in real life. The way Chang glides so gracefully from modern dance to ballet to acrobatics to martial arts has to be seen to be believed. Changs presents a perfect synthesis of dynamism and elegance and thus fully embodies the choreographers’ idealized view of Yip Man, unperturbable in life because of the strength and equanimity he derives from his philosophy. We see through Chang’s performance that Wing Chun is simply and extension into the physical realm of this philosophy. Even when at peace, Chung seems imbued with a power far beyond what we can imagine from the quiet, humble way he behaves.

The next most impressive performance comes from Wang Yuanlin 许天慧, who plays both the Director and the Baguazhang master. Wang moves in such radically different ways as the two characters I had no idea until the end credits that one person played both roles. As the Director, she moves in a slow, methodical fashion. As the Baguazhang master, Wang displays the art’s typical spiralling movements with its quick angle changes and sudden strikes. Her vulnerability as the Director contrasts completely with the might she demonstrates as the master.

A third notable performance is that of Feng Hoaran 冯浩然 as Da Chun. Feng effects a great change in his Da Chun’s nature from the boisterous, not always attentive young man who bounces onto the movie set in Act 1 to the amazingly disciplined Wing Chun master that the character of Yip Man inspires him to be. The dream sequence with the Muk Yan Jong shows that Feng can perfectly replicate Chang Hongli’s moves, and several more such sequences follow as Da Chun identifies ever more closely with Yip Man. In one, both Feng and Chang bend backwards in such a way that, incredibly, they touch their shoulders to the ground without the use of their hands.

By the time Wing Chun Dance Drama closes on January 4, 2026, it will have reached its 300th performance. The beautifully integrated use of music, movement and design and the phenomenal performance of Chang Hongli make this a work that should appeal to theatre-lovers in general, not just lovers of dance and martial arts. The show has already had acclaimed runs outside China in Singapore, London, Paris, St. Petersburg and Moscow. We are exceedingly fortunate to be able to experience a performance of such artistry and historical importance here in Toronto.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Zeng Baisheng as the Kung Fu Master and Chang Hongli as Yip Man; the House of 72 Tenants, film crew in lower right corner; Xu Tianhui as Wing-sing and Chang Hongli as Yip Man; Chang Hongli as Yip Man (centre) with ensemble; Zeng Baisheng as the Kung Fu Master and Chang Hongli as Yip Man; Chang Hongli as Yip Man (aloft) and Zeng Baisheng as the Kung Fu Master. © 2022 Wing Chun Dance Drama.

For tickets visit: www.wingchundancedrama.com.