“Crotch top” made from tights
A carryover from my prepubescent days training as a bunhead, these things are forever magical, in that you cut the crotch out and they become a top! They’re the comfiest things to rehearse in, and I like to wear mine with my hair all tucked up in a matching wig cap to feel streamlined and neutral.
A robe or muumuu
Lounging in a dressing gown in a hotel is the height of luxury. Feeling large swaths of fabric ripple across the body is heavenly.
Records/record player
I’m not an “It sounds so much better on 200g vinyl” snob, but I forever support the active listening experience of Side A and B, while physically holding and looking at the liner notes and artwork on the covers. My past work has included live soundtracks with a turntable onstage and I love how it provides a great marker of time for the performance. What do you play as the last song an audience might hear?
Shoes
I have been in some form of pedestrian footwear for all my performances. I love dancing in heels. For better or worse, they instantly restructure your posture, tone your calves and thighs and create a different centre of balance. The morbidity in the title of my new work comes from the Italian neorealist film Obsession. It caught my ear and since the performance space is occupied by a bed, it makes a perfect, soft, bouncy and complicated stage that shoes accentuate. Wearing heels in bed is horrifically conflicted and counterintuitive.
Ming Hon is an independent dancer, choreographer and performance artist based in Winnipeg – a graduate of the School of Contemporary Dancers Senior Professional Program. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Winnipeg, she found a loophole that afforded her a slim chance of winning the crown for Miss Hong Kong 2003. Thinking she could secretly undermine the pageantry and its fanfare of endorsements, the judges proved her wrong and were not interested. In her practice Hon explores themes of work, labour, leisure, luxury, capitalism and the economy and politics of the female body.
Hon is in the midst of preparing for a new solo show, Only the Dead Wear Shoes to Bed, based on the narrative of a person in a hotel who luxuriates in the parameters of a standard queen room. For the audience it is slowly revealed that the room is an idyllic imagined refuge from the world outside, pre-apocalyptic, war stricken and blazing from environmental disaster.
What does one pack for a trip to the end of the world?
Hon premieres Only the Dead Wear Shoes to Bed on September 15th in Synonym Art Consultation’s WALL-to-WALL Mural and Culture Festival from September 1st through 30th in Winnipeg.
Learn more >> synonymartconsultation.com
Tagged: dance bag, Performance Art, What's In Your Dancebag?, MB , Winnipeg