All the Fun of the Fringe
Alexandra Carroll takes you through this year’s City Festival highlights and speaks with Artistic Director Benny Chia about the Hong Kong-focused program.
After Bergen, San Francisco, Vienna, Honolulu, Melbourne, Seoul and Singapore, the annual City Festival at the Fringe Club finally swings its spotlight over Hong Kong, highlighting some of our best and brightest performers, directors, artists and cultural commentators.
Each year, when the Fringe Club hosts the annual City Festival, a series of programs are selected to demonstrate the urban culture of a particular city. You would think that selecting programs from your own city would be easy, but Artistic Director Benny Chia found it fraught with challenges. “It’s difficult when you are so familiar with the city – you have certain ideas or feelings that are deeply ingrained, but they might not be a fair representation,” he says. Chia points to the old complaint that “no one in Hong Kong reads books” and the reality of the fact that the independent publishing sector has had a mini-boom in recent years. Consequently, the Independent Publishers of Hong Kong will be hosting a “create a book” session as part of the Festival (Jan 13). Similarly, the Fringe was keen to select those works that show an alternative vision of Hong Kong urban culture. “We’re trying to show a range of programs,” says Chia. “But we’re not showing the most obvious or available works.” Chia gives the example of “Yellow Wallpaper” (Jan 26-27). The play was written by 19th century feminist, Charlotte Gilman Perkins and adapted by Hong Kong’s Theatre Action. “‘Yellow Wallpaper’ is really extraordinary,” says Chia. “But it’s not the kind of work that you’d see in the program of a conventional arts festival.”
What made Chia’s job of selecting Hong Kong works even more difficult is the fact that the programs will travel to Singapore in February, a week after the festival closes here. Chia and the team, therefore, were choosing shows for two different audiences – at home and abroad. But the Fringe is pretty familiar with the Singaporean audiences, having taken a small number of programs there in 2005 and hosting a whole batch of Singaporean performers here in last year’s festival. The long-standing relationship between the Fringe Club and its Singaporean counterpart, the Arts House, was supported by the Singaporean and Hong Kong governments when they signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2004. Consequently, there has been more money and support for cultural exchanges.
Despite the injection of funds, the City Festival can’t really afford to have a shopping list and go around freely picking all the shows it would like. Instead, the Festival must forge creative partnerships with organizations such as the Academy of Performing Arts or the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Chia is particularly proud of how he managed to get the award-winning Hong Kong-based cinematographer Chris Doyle to create a documentary especially for the Festival. “We don’t have any resources to create a film so we went to the Academy of Performing Arts which has a terrific film school. We invited a recent graduate director to work with Chris and give him all the post-production support he would need.” The resulting film, “Lost & Found in Hong Kong,” was created with the assistance of Kiwi Chow and screens up on the Fringe Club roof on Jan 13, 17 and 25.
The City Festival has also forged partnerships with some more alternative organizations. The recent battles for heritage preservation have marked Hong Kong’s urban and political environments. The City Festival will be hosting an exhibition named “12 Hour Stay in Victoria Prison” (Jan 11-27). The exhibition is the result of work done by 100 citizens who spent 12 hours within the prison walls hoping to broaden their understanding of its cultural relevancy. “We think these activities are very important,” says Chia. “We agree that you have to be able to feel the authenticity of the city you live in– that’s why these people are so concerned with our heritage. It’s the beginning of a new movement,” says Chia. “People are feeling the ownership of their city and not as though they are living under someone else’s roof.”
While heritage conservation is an underlying theme of several of the “City Culture” programs, the pollution problem makes for a far subtler statement. The design of this year’s festival pamphlet features a gray skyline set over the cityscape, punctuated only by a hazy orange ball of light. Political statement or Hong Konger in-joke? Either way, the City Festival can be proud that their representation of Hong Kong urban culture is an honest one.