Colours leap off the canvas and pale into significance on stage

Turning brushstrokes on canvas into movements in space fascinates Hong Kong's reigning queen of choreography, Helen Lai, of the City Contemporary Dance Company. In an earlier work, Frida, Lai took five paintings by the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and translated them into a ravishing dance piece that evoked the artist's extraordinary life.

Kahlo's paintings are naive and easy to read, far removed from the abstract technicolour works of Hong Kong artist Yank Wong Yan-kwai, whose paintings are the starting point for Lai's new dance piece, Colour Fugue.

Wong's paintings swirl with bright, hard acrylic paint, primary reds, yellows, blues and greens jostling in a hectic visual marketplace with titles such as Broken White and Sardine Blue. Turning these paintings into dance might conjure images of athletic bodies ricocheting off each other like coloured beads on a nursery abacus. Yet the dancers will be dressed in white.

Independently, both Lai and Wong react scornfully to any suggestion that colour can have meaning. The suggestion that red could represent energy and blue spirituality is anathema to them. 'I'm not interested in that kind of interpretation of colour,' Lai says. 'That's far too simplistic.' The aim is not to look at colour, Wong says, but to think about colour. 'Not using colour in the performance is quite conceptual. White is also a colour, so you can't escape colour even though it apparently isn't there.'

Lai is interested in 'the relationships between colours that create movement'.

'In the first section of the dance I'm trying to use the dancers' bodies in space as an artist would use oil on canvas - a dancer's movement equivalent to an artist's brushstroke.'

Asked to sum up Wong's work in three adjectives Lai doesn't hesitate: 'vibrant, restless, active'. And in those words lie the seeds of her new work.