It will be fun and, above all, it is free, so anyone living within a short ride, drive or stroll of Sha Tin Town Hall should make their way to the Sha Tin Arts Fair on Sunday. Part of the Fringe Festival, the event includes all kinds of performers, magicians, dancers, artists, mime artists and clowns who will do their thing between noon and 5pm. There will be a spectacular performance from the extraordinary Japanese juggler who calls himself Rola Bola Hanger Man. Rola Bola Man (his regular name is Inukai Shinji) juggles with very, very sharp knives. He does this while balancing on a Rola Bola board (hence the name) and sometimes he sets off on unicycle. The other not-to-be-missed is a performance by the Firewater Ensemble, the samba group from Edinburgh who have undoubtedly been the most exciting part of the festival so far. The ensemble's workshops have been so popular (and so exhausting, according to participants) that there will be an extra performance at the Fringe Club as well. Samba Extravaganza! will be at 10.30pm on Sunday evening at the La Cremeria Theatre. Man finds a multimedia mission Wilson Tsang's intriguing multimedia performance Songs From The Pebble House emerged partly out of his desire to 'maintain the habit of creation'. His day job is working as a graphic designer, but over the years he has also staged several performances. In this new work, for which he wrote the music as well as doing anything else, he has tried to create a kind of diary about a man who is wondering who he is, and where he has come from. 'It's a monologue on how a man wants to escape his past, how he loses his memory, and how he passes through the ordinary experiences of daily life.' In one section, he uses the voice of his four-year-old son, arguing with his mother, to make a point about how conversations between children and adults can turn into conflicts. 'It's a little bit like torture, a distorted sound, like the sound on your Walkman when the batteries are running down.' Songs From The Pebble House plays on January 20 to 21 at 7.15pm at the Fringe Studio. Hong Kong escape artists on show When Hong Kong artist Wong Shun-kit, who grew up in Shanghai, exhibited there with nine other Hong Kong artists last June in an important semi-official display of oil paintings he was shocked by what he found. 'The Shanghai artists are so commercial!' he said. His remarks say something telling about the contrasting development of Hong Kong and mainland contemporary art. In China, for some bright, unorthodox free spirits, art can be a way to escape and make money. In Hong Kong, art is also a way to escape by consciously rejecting the desire to make money. The paintings that local artists like Jackson Yu, Hale Man, Lau Chung-hang and Hay Yong took to Shanghai will go on display at the Arts Centre today until Sunday. Genius of Lewis Carroll revisited If Charles Dodgson had not had a thing about little girls, this would probably be written by someone called Matilda or Patricia Cairns. Instead, my parents were inspired by his photographs of Alice Liddell scowling into the camera. 'You looked so serious, so we called you Alice.' Dodgson died 100 years ago this year and the British Council are celebrating his work in an exhibition called Tweedledum and Tweedledee: An Exhibition of the Life and Works of Lewis Carroll, which runs at the British Council Library in Admiralty from January 19 to February 8, and then tours libraries around Hong Kong. Looking and seeing the difference Portuguese photographer Goncalo Magalhaes has not been taking photographs for very long, but he has such a good eye for people-watching that he already has an interesting set of images which go on display at the Dragon's Back Gallery from today until January 22. There are the things we have all seen, and yet not seen: a sleeping fruit seller snoring behind his fruit; a spiky-haired mainlander and his plump wife peering out of a hard sleeper train window; and the blurred face of a tired commuter behind the glass of a tram.
