Online Review: Never Dance Alone ( M Club女人俱樂部)

Never Dance Alone ( M Club女人俱樂部) is a Hong Kong television drama produced and broadcasted by TVB in April 2014. It is about the lives of 6 women: Siu Sze, Julie, Akina, Yuen Chau, Jenny and Cyndi, who belong to a dancing group called “M Club”, with flashbacks of their secondary school lives in 1980s Hong Kong.

Teenage Julie was a new immigrant. Classmates teased about her accent and called her ‘Chian Mui’(燦妹). Julie sought to improve her image of ‘Chian Mui’ with classmates so she practiced Cantonese with Siu-Sze and learned spruce up herself.

Television constructs “collections” of people. The term ‘Chian Mui’ is developed from ‘Ah Chian’, which first appeared in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a TVB drama broadcasted in 1979. ‘Ah Chian’ has become the personification of all new immigrants. In the texts, Julie was discriminated by her classmates because of her old school outlook, accent and her identity. The classmates thought that they are better than Julie so they looked down on her. Television offers membership categories from which cultural identities can be constructed. The identity boundaries structured ideologically in hierarchies and inequalities.

One of the selling points of the drama is the memories of 5 women’s younger days. The props, the choices of songs and the cultural context show that the production team has to be very familiar with people and things in old days. For example, the tongue twister of McDonald’s, Sister Magazine, classic advertisement of lemon tea, and stake of 30 hamburgers…The wording used in the drama also is from the old days. Collective memory of 1980s Hong Kong is conveyed in the drama. With reference to Maurice Halbwachs’ work (1980), memory is at the very core of identity. And it connects who we are to who we once were. Collective memory is embodied in ‘memory industries’. In this drama, it is embodied in the contemporary popular culture: aerobic dance, Alan Tam’s songs, etc.

The drama carries the audiences who live in 1980s Hong Kong along with its context.

The audiences who live in 1980s Hong Kong have sympathetic understanding. Each individual memory of a group is understood only if each memory is located within the thought of the corresponding group. The memory would not be too meaningful for 90s group since they do not resemble each other and they do not experience 1980s.

According to Andrew Sarris’ auteur theory, an auteur’s style includes the characteristics that are repeated in a director’s works and characteristics that serve as a director’s signature. Eric Tsang, a director of Never Dance Alone, is good at depicting memories of old time. Among his works, for example, I Love Hong Kong is about the people’s life in public housing estate. And in I Love Hong Kong 2013, he portrayed the history of Hong Kong people from the Chinese restaurant’s angle.

Besides, interior meaning makes connections between director’s personal interests and the films he has made. However, there is less Tsang’s personal experience related to the drama.

Leung Sin Yu  10592135