From rope bondage to string quartets: arts festival focused on Hong Kong stage, dance and music talent at Tai Kwun centre
- Dance performance ‘Under Line’ – a ‘physical narrative’ of taboos – is the most titillating programme in Tai Kwun’s six-week arts festival starting April 2
- Immersive play ‘A Poem in Jail’ was inspired by a poem a women inmate carved into a bed at Victoria Prison, where Tai Kwun is now located
The Tai Kwun arts and heritage centre in Hong Kong’s Central district is making the most of the resumption of live performances in the city by launching a six-week arts festival on site. Called “Spotlight”, its focus is very much on local stage, dance and music talents given that overseas performers still cannot come to the city easily.
Dance performance Under Line, by choreographer Rebecca Wong Pik-kei, is the most titillating by far. Wong continues to explore the power relations of desire, sex and gender through dance, and this new commission is described – rather luridly – as a “physical narrative” of taboos that involves the “teetering between pleasure and pain” of rope bondage. There is a serious message behind it though: can we lose the shackles that are our socially conditioned attitudes to sex?
Another local choreographer, Joseph Lee Wai-nang, will lead a group of dancers in a less racy exploration of the body. Unfolding Images: We Are Spectacle(s) looks at the digital age’s effects on how we see and are being seen. The performance is a follow-up to his 2016 solo dance piece called Folding Echoes, a well-received work that he has performed numerous times locally and abroad.
There are two music programmes that both feature new pieces by local composers. Patrick Yim Tin-sing, a violinist and assistant professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University, will play three newly commissioned works by Austin Yip Ho-kwen, Chan Kai-young and Daniel Lo Ting-cheung. The premieres are on April 21 with all three composers present for a question-and-answer session.
Separately, one of Hong Kong’s most versatile and creative composers, Joyce Tang Wai-chung, has written a piece for two local string quartets to play together. Called Double Exposure, it is commissioned especially for Cong and Romer (the latter is named after a unique species of Hong Kong tree frog) to perform in April. For those new to these Hong Kong string quartets, they were both formed several years ago by young, overseas-trained musicians.
There are two Cantonese theatre programmes in the festival. This Victoria has No Secrets … For Now – which will be performed outdoors in the Parade Ground for free – is a new production of a popular a cappella theatre about Hong Kong’s history, popular culture and collective memories.
“Spotlight: Tai Kwun’s Performing Arts Season”, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central. April 2 to May 16, 2021.
