Hong Kong Arts Festival’s 2017 line-up is a refreshing change
Often criticised as too conservative and behind the times, organisers have swapped Shakespeare for contemporary theatre and co-commissioned an opera. Jane Birkin and favourites Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch return
The Hong Kong Arts Festival has unveiled the full programme for its 45th edition, which starts in February 2017, and it contains some surprises that may appease critics who complain that Asia’s largest performance arts showcase is too conservative, too focused on bringing over the big names and too late with everything.
Even the website is much improved and easier to navigate.
Take the theatre section, for example. Previous years have often featured big UK groups with their British Council-endorsed, school-friendly programming. There will always be appetite for Shakespeare, but it is refreshing to see that next year’s offerings are all contemporary and wonderfully relevant.
The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family is a trilogy fresh from New York’s Public Theatre that is set around the kitchen table of a suburban American family. It will be interesting to see how A Floating Family – the festival’s own commission, also a set of three plays that track the life of a local family – measures up. The latter is written by Loong Man-hong and directed by Fong Chun-kit, the team behind last year’s similarly themed The Abandoned Harbour, which received mixed reviews. A Floating Family takes a look at one family’s experience through the handover 20 years earlier and the Sars epidemic, and looks ahead to the next chief executive election.