Taking center stage

French mime Julien Cottereau, who poses at the Bouffes Parisiens theater in Paris, will play his one-man show Imagine Toi during the Macao Arts Festival. Franck Fife/AFP

Japan's original contemporary shadow play theater Kakashiza brings the Wild Kingdom to Macao with agile hands against light and shadow in Animare (May 10-13).

And Julien Cottereau, a mime and former clown with Cirque du Soleil, will mesmerize audiences as a little boy in Imagine Toi (May 23-25).

"I would highlight Dance, a seminal collaboration among three 20th-century masters－choreography by Lucinda Childs and music composed by Philip Glass, set against the Modernist film by visual artist Sol LeWitt," Lam says.

Dance combines the athleticism of contemporary dance movements with natural walking rhythms, leaps and sudden changes in direction for a complex show that appears simple. The live dancers are juxtaposed against LeWitt's film background of 1979 dancers performing the same routine. Dance was revived in 2009 before touring London, Vienna and New York City.

"Dance is much the same as it was originally seen in 1979," admits Alisa Regas, managing director and creative principal with Pomegranate Arts, the company mounting Dance with Childs.

"The main difference is actually in the dancers themselves. Onscreen, the dancers from 1979 were much less formally trained and have a different quality to the movement. This has been one of the most interesting aspects of the project: The work itself appears timeless while the dancers interpreting it are very much of our own era."