Nathalie Junod Ponsard's exhibition Red In Circle at the Agfa Gallery at the Fringe Club drew mixed reactions from the drinking crowd who packed the place last Saturday for the exhibition opening.
Ponsard's central motif is red circles, which appear in all of the sparse, simple and rather lovely paintings. She has also created an installation made of a huge circle of red pigment, dotted with tiny red lights, which arches around the gallery floor. Some viewers were immediately struck by the practical difficulties. 'Just as well they didn't have this here last week when the kids' shows were on,' said one parent sagely. 'They'd have trampled it everywhere.' Others were apparently too addled to even notice the horizontal element of the exhibition. More than one drunken art lover, keen to study the vertical paintings in more detail, walked over the circle of pigment, which is piled a good 20 centimetres deep in places, without even noticing it.
Tourists' loss is Hong Kong's gain The Takarazuka Revue Company, performing here this week at the Grand Theatre, was originally booked by the Hong Kong Tourist Authority as an attempt to boost tourism, post-handover. As things have turned out, there are few tourists around to see them, but plenty of cash-poor Hong Kongers who need cheering up.
And Takarazuka is guaranteed to do that. The all-female cast perform a mixture of traditional Japanese stuff in kimonos, and a completely outrageous, non-traditional cabaret that is Busby Berkeley Japanese-style, feathery outfits, high kicks and one of those huge staircases.
In Japan this group has near-cult status among their thousands of mainly female fans. It was invented more than 80 years ago in the town of Takarazuka which, back then, didn't have much going for it except for a railway station. Today, the town is famous for producing generation after generation of talented actresses, some of whom play only male roles, and for the daily shows which are designed so that the audience from Tokyo can come to see it, and be back to welcome home husband and children.
When tickets for this week's show went on sale, the local Japanese community snapped up 10,000 of them, such is the Takarazuka reputation. The shows continue until Sunday, each night at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.
