Wind & Foster

from Great British Design 2020

by DITHK Marcomms

Neville Brody

MOVING CITIES

Wind & Foster is a London based creative studio producing digital content for all platforms, with a specialism in short form film. Led by Creative Director, Jevan Chowdhury, their flagship series Moving Cities captures the intersection of arts and everyday life through dance.

As part of the 2019 Business of Design Week they worked with Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) and the Hong Kong Ballet to create This is Wan Chai, Hong Kong’s largest photographic art installation.

Here, FUSED talks to Jevan about Moving Cities, why dance has such an impact in public spaces, and what This is Wan Chai hopes to achieve.

The art of dance and where you experience it has changed in recent times. We now take much of our entertainment in micro doses, and dance has seemingly become no different. At one time the place to experience choreographed dance was in an auditorium or dance hall, dancers holing themselves up in rooms full of mirrors for hours on end, to only appear for a prepared audience. Set hours, set routine, set audience. But as our routines have changed, so have we.

Today dance is for everyone – Saturday night TV, TikTok teenagers and their grans, dancing in the street and on the building site. As it should be, because dance is for everyone. But in a world where anyone can have a YouTube channel

and teenagers amass millions of followers, we are no longer the audience, we are also the stars. And we wondered: Have we lost the ability to truly connect and be moved by dance as an art form? And so Moving Cities was born. A project to humanise transient spaces using dance – the rhythmic behaviour of people – as a regenerative vehicle for those neglected corners of our concrete jungle.

Since 2001, Wind & Foster has helped international organisations, government bodies and cultural institutions realise their vision. As an emerging agency of choice, it has produced the majority of its work in cities for cities, with the goal to exceed expectations whilst keeping work accessible to everyone.

Using their expertise in the built environment, Wind & Foster have produced international awardwinning work under the Moving Cities banner, with a vision to see each city and its infrastructure dancing as one. More often than not this will manifest into either a film or permanent art installation in which multiple ballet and contemporary dance artists participate in one rhythmic movement.

The transformative project has initiated collaborations between 104 dance companies and their city municipalities. It is an extremely successful placemaking project that brings together organisations, local government, schools and institutions, to create a timeless piece of art with captivating results.

It shows us that cities, like machines, are not designed to stop, that everything constantly moves, and if you look hard enough you can see it dancing. We are all part of this choreography. We all contribute to it and this is why it is quite novel to watch a dancer within it.

As clients in Barcelona, Dallas, Prague, Athens and recently in Hong Kong have discovered, pressing the Moving Cities button has a sort of magic unifying effect. As a cultural project it ticks boxes, but as a form of placemaking, shining a spotlight on people first over iconic buildings, bridges and rivers, it feels so obvious and so right.

In this latest brief, Wind & Foster have produced Hong Kong’s largest photograph for the 78,000 daily commuters of MTR. If you disembark now at Wan Chai you will be experience a dance story. A life-like meandering 220 metre narrative that unfolds throughout the station.

Jevan has again thrown a spotlight on the visceral world of dance. He has done this in 21 other cities but in Hong Kong for the first time, he has done it in the form of an enormous photographic story. Capturing the Hong Kong Ballet frozen in time, the story of the ‘Last Train’ is re-enacted by 40 principal, soloist, coryphée and corps de ballet dancers together with over 300 members of the public. ‘The Last Train’ later retitled ‘This is Wan Chai’ is designed to be viewed on the move.

Whether we watch it or do it, dance is the most present and conscious experience we have. It reminds us overwhelmingly of who we are. It is the physical definition of being alive and like any dancer will tell you it is the only way to be uncontrolled and ‘in the moment’. To quote Auguste Rodin: “The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” Against the backdrop of the MTR physically moving people around Hong Kong, the hope is that alongside these tangible movements, Moving Cities also moves your core.