This dance show brings dizzying kung fu to Toronto — with a side of questionable Chinese mythmaking

Such as when Chang Hongji, playing the legendary Chinese martial artist Yip Man, torpedoes through the air, torso flying like a bullet. Or when, in a later scene that depicts Yip as he mourns the death of one of his students, Chang launches himself off the stage, only for his body to slam sideways onto the floor, over and over again. 

Co-directors Han Zhen and Zhou Liya, who also co-choreographed “Wing Chun,” stage the piece like a film. Hu Yanjun’s enormous set, fitted with a turntable, features five towering structures that transform into the bustling streets and alleyways of Hong Kong. Then there’s Ren Dongsheng’s lighting designs, which narrow and widen our field of vision, almost like a camera’s aperture. And composer Yang Fan’s score, a brilliant east-meets-west soundscape, propels the action forward, with heavy percussion and luscious string accompaniment. 

But despite the filmic atmosphere conjured by Han and Zhou, making you feel as if you’re watching an action flick, everything is still happening in real time in front of our eyes. No edits. No cuts. No second takes. And that’s what makes “Wing Chun” all the more impressive. 

The actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, perhaps Yip’s most famous protégé, once said that the ideal of martial arts is “unnatural naturalness or natural unnaturalness.”

It’s an ideal wholly embraced by this production. Han and Zhou’s breathtaking choreography — blending, at times, a cheeky contemporary dance sensibility with traditional martial arts — sits at the juncture of control and chaos, of explosiveness and restraint, revelling in the oxymoron inherent to the term martial arts.

When Chang is onstage, kicking, punching and tumbling about, it always feels as if he’s on the threshold of what the human body can do. But he executes everything with stoic precision, all the way down to the perfect flick and follow-through of his wrist. He’s never not in control. 

But this artistry and athleticism, along with the Han and Zhou’s arresting stagecraft, is diminished by an awkward, somewhat ahistorical narrative that, unlike the taut choreography in the work, often comes across as slack and lethargic. 

It’s telling, in fact, that there isn’t a playwright or even a dramaturge listed among the production’s creative team. And the show ultimately suffers because of that. 

Its story offers up two parallel narratives. One recounts Yip’s story as he establishes his Wing Chun martial arts practice in 1950s Hong Kong. Another, set some four decades later, follows an ambitious young lighting technician (played by Feng Haoran) working on the set of a biographical film about Yip’s journey. 

But the production’s attempts to tie both of these narratives together — with a hokey theme about how “greatness lies within all of us,” literally spelled out on digital screens at the end of the show — feels forced. As well, a tangential foray into the story of Yip’s wife, Wing Sing (Xu Tianhui), comes out of nowhere.

Worse, for a show that aims to offer a biographical look at Yip’s life, “Wing Chun” too frequently plays fast and loose with the facts. It conveniently omits, for instance, how Yip sided against the Chinese Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War. (That’s why he eventually fled to Hong Kong.)

It also leaves out much of Yip’s upbringing — like how he came from a wealthy family, started his career as a police officer and lost most of his fortune during the war — as well as how, later in life, he became addicted to opium. (“Wing Chun,” it should be noted, is state-funded by the Chinese government, which may explain some of these omissions.) 

Instead, the production is a slick, glossy piece of mythmaking: presenting Yip as a Chinese folk hero rather than the far more complicated and fascinating individual he truly was.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, every culture mythologizes its stars in one way or another. Even here in Canada, we are not immune to this. But in polishing Yip’s story into such a bright, unblemished sheen, “Wing Chun” strips its narrative of its inherent tension and gritty drive.

By the end, you’ll walk out admiring the show’s brilliant feats of athleticism, but also frustrated by its empty, hollow centre.