The Many Unlived Lives of Tibetan Choreographer Sang Jijia

There were two careers mapped out for Sang Jijia from before he was even born – and neither dancer nor choreographer was in the stars. As one of two boys born to a Tibetan family in a small mountainous village in Xiahe County, in the central Chinese province of Gansu, tradition dictated that he should become either a monk or a translator.

“We have just the main street,” Sang remembers of the tiny hometown he was born into in 1973, which his four siblings still call home today. “If you buy an ice cream, you cannot finish eating it while walking from one end to the other – it’s that small.”

This heritage is also the reason the recently appointed artistic director of Hong Kong’s City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) has no surname, as is customary in Tibetan culture.

Having already written for the local newspaper at age 12, Sang Jijia’s preference was to become a translator. However his destiny changed instantly when he was handpicked by touring scouts to study dance at the Beijing Central University for Nationalities (now the Minzu University of China), the controversial institution established to educate members of China’s 55 officially recognised ethnic minority groups. All despite the fact the pre-teen boy had zero experience or interest in the performing arts. Why then did they pick him from the crowd? “I really don’t know,” he says. “I mean, it must have been something. There was a kind of test – okay, how long are your arms, how long are your legs, do some rhythms, and you dance to something. That’s it.”

So instead of a life of religion, or words, Sang Jijia was destined for a career in dance – first as a performer and today as a choreographer. He has previously fulfilled both roles with CCDC, and his appointment to lead the company marks the culmination of a three-decade relationship with Hong Kong’s leading modern dance group. 

The one thing he hopes to bring to his tenure? “Stability,” answers Sang Jijia, who watched with concern the company’s high artistic turnover of recent years, which saw the core cast of 14 performers slim to just eight dancers. “The previous artistic director’s focus was a lot more on Hong Kong – basically just kind of localising things and making it Hong Kong for Hong Kong, that was kind of his attitude and the theme,” he says. “Which is good in some sense. But unfortunately because of that, there was quite a bit of turnover on the artistic side. So I want to go back to the time before, when CCDC had a lot more of an international mindset and ambition.”

The announcement of his appointment in late 2024 marked something of a hat trick: the same year, Sang Jijia received two notable honours, claiming a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Hong Kong Dance Awards, and he was named Artist of the Year (Dance) at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. And while a rigorous selection process was necessary to appoint him to the government-funded CCDC, in the end the top role went to the one applicant who didn’t even need to apply. 

To the company’s board, Sang Jijia represents a safe pair of hands after four years under his predecessor Yuri Ng, who steered the CCDC through two years of tough pandemic times; a full half of Ng’s term passed before Hong Kong’s Covid-19 restrictions and border closures were rescinded. “[Sang Jijia] was the natural choice to be our next leader,” affirms CCDC executive director Christopher Ng, in between helping out as translator. “He’s evolved and grown with the company. We attribute a lot of the success of the company to him. A lot of our best repertoire comes from him. It’s just standard industry knowledge: that’s exactly what we were looking for.”

Heading south

If 12-year-old Sang Jijia was scared or intimidated at the time — after being plucked from his home, family and culture to start alone and afresh in the capital — four decades later all he remembers is the excitement. “I mean, for me, first of all, I wanted to see the big city,” remembers the now 52 year old. “Living in that small town, at that time, we couldn’t even see the television. That’s why I said, okay – to go to Beijing to study something, that for me was a big chance.”

Sang Jijia completed seven years of study with the Beijing academy and, in 1993, moved south to join the newly established Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC). As a performer with China’s first professional modern dance group, Sang Jijia toured across Asia, Europe and the US, presenting pre-internet audiences with their first taste of contemporary Chinese performing arts. “The first time we went to America, New York was such a shock for us,” he remembers. “We walked around for 12 hours and didn’t want to stop. We just wanted to look at everything.” 

Onstage, his work was quickly and loudly hailed critically both at home (named “Star of the Century” by the Guangdong Provincial Government in 1997), and abroad (winning a gold medal in the modern dance section of the 1996 Paris International Dance Competition). He owes much of that exposure to GMDC’s artistic director Willy Tsao, the influential figure who had already helped introduce modern dance to Hong Kong when he founded CCDC in 1979. Recognised as a pioneer of dance in China, Tsao led the company in his image for close to four decades — until 2019, with a brief break between 1985 and 1989 — and would also later serve as artistic director of the Beijing Modern Dance Company from 1999, before establishing China’s first independent professional contemporary dance company, BeijingDance/LDTX, in 2005.

For university-trained Sang Jijia, Tsao’s trailblazing original work inspired his own first forays into choreography: “I didn’t learn how to create in school. But [GMDC] allowed me to realise my dream of creating my own work. After that, our work spread all over the world.”

Tsao was likewise impressed by Sang Jijia’s growing potential, and soon invited his young mentee across the border to collaborate with CCDC, before the young dancer eventually joined the Hong Kong company in 1999. “Willy empowered his dancers, his performers. If they had ideas, he would encourage them to develop them,” says Sang Jijia. “I came to Hong Kong because of Willy.”

Different homes

After winning two prestigious scholarships that took him for longer stays in the US, Sang Jijia left Hong Kong in 2002, when he was chosen to study under renowned American choreographer William Forsythe in Germany, where he worked with the Ballett Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company as assistant choreographer and dancer. Seven years later, and now in his mid-30s, Sang Jijia made the sudden decision to retire from the stage altogether, after an especially arduous presentation of his solo piece “Snow” at the NYC Fall For Dance festival. “The length of the piece was around 15 minutes, and after the show finished I laid down on the floor for around half an hour, and said no, I cannot do this any more. It’s time,” he remembers. “I told myself, you need to stop dancing on stage, because you are not good enough.”

His heartbreak was evident to a perceptive audience. One commentator wrote at the time: “There were many facial expressions that we saw during the course of the piece: the frustration of the dancer as he glided across the stage, his admiration of the falling snow, and the facial ‘peace’ that he landed in towards the end of the piece … It was beautiful to be able to relate to his feelings.”

Instead, Sang Jijia returned to China and contemplated starting his own company, following a loosening of restrictions that allowed independently founded arts companies for the first time. “I had a lot of struggle,” he admits. “At that moment, it was a good chance [to do something new].” Instead he followed Tsao, working with both GMDC and BeijingDance/LDTX, before returning to Hong Kong as CCDC’s resident choreographer from 2014. Since returning to the city his work has been celebrated as some of the company’s most distinctive and creative, with critical smashes Re-mark, Meeting In-between Time and Stream of Dust all winners recognised by the Hong Kong Dance Awards.

Yet asked to single out a career high, he names his “attempt to make the most miserable work,” Post-Perception/Transcendence, a 2017 creation slaughtered by the South China Morning Post in a review headlined “possibly the worst original Hong Kong dance production we’ve seen”.

Closing the circle

After officially taking over CCDC’s fifth artistic director on January 1, 2025, Sang Jijia’s first full season at the helm kicks off on May 2 with three performances of Mr Blank 2.0 at Kwai Tsing Theatre, reviving and reworking an earlier piece that explores the growing role of big tech in our daily lives. The choreographer believes that the geopolitical upheaval experienced over the seven years that have passed since the piece’s initial conception only intensifies its key concerns with surveillance and privacy: “Because of this situation [now], you can imagine things differently. It’s a good moment to re-evaluate and re-approach [this piece].”

But Sang Jijia’s future intentions for the company may be best epitomised by looking forward to the forthcoming A Triple Bill, which will present a classic piece by his other great mentor, William Forsythe, alongside fresh commissions from rising stars Hung Tsai-tsi and Sita Ostheimer. Set to be staged at The Box in West Kowloon, on a to-be-confirmed date in December, the presentation is the first in a planned flagship annual platform which will allow Sang Jijia to bring groundbreaking work from across the world to Hong Kong. 

Meanwhile, his first goal — that promised stability — has already been achieved: CCDC’s full-time cast is healthily back up to 14, with local talent complemented by dancers from Taiwan, mainland China and the Philippines, and future scouting missions are planned to recruit dancers from Japan and Korea. Sang Jijia’s ultimate goal, though, isn’t just finding and retaining talent, but nurturing it, inspiring his dancers to create their own work, in the same way Tsao inspired his first creations decades ago, when he first joined the company in Hong Kong. “I want to cultivate our own artists – that’s my ultimate goal,” he adds. “Empower them, give them incentives to come up with their own initiatives and their own works, and give them a platform to showcase their creativity.

“Dance is quite unique because we don’t need to speak, we just use our body and language to express our feelings, what we want to say – and right now those are the kind of artists I want to grow.”