words cindy lam

Asian ingredients and cross-culture flavours spice up the New Vision Arts Festival.

It is a bit like fusion cuisine – the New Vision Arts Festival has a rather delectable menu of performances from around the world, all sauced with an Asian flavour. As Senior Manager Elaine Yeung says, “While other Asian cities also host contemporary art festivals, this festival is the only one of its kind stressing Asian elements through a range of specially commissioned woks. It’s a festival full of performances to stimulate all your senses”.

The festival is held biannually, owing to the intricacies of having to match artists, usually at least one of whom is Asian, from different countries. The pairing, for instance, of Japanese composer Karen Tanaka with ultra-modern dance exponents Nederlands Dans Theater I led to Renature, one dance of the triple bill that forms the festival’s opening presentation. As nature is destroyed through pollution, global warming and human mismanagement, Tanaka’s music and the dancers desperately try to find a way to win back humanity’s lost heritage, to ‘renature’. This dance was jointly commissioned by New Vision’s organizers and the Netherlands’ dance company. The other dances on the programme are Shoot the Moon, with music by Philip Glass, which revolves (literally) around relationships and Tar and Feathers choreographed by Jirí Kylián on music by Mozart, Dirk Haubrich and Samuel Beckett.

Another commissioned highlight will be Liang Hongyu the last of the Trilogy of War Heroines – which received its world premiere at the Holland Festival this June – which includes Mu Guiying (2003) and Hua Mulan (2004); a very different interpretation of the legend to Disney animated film.

After refusing any reward from the Emperor the famous prostitute and warrior Liang Hongyu lives in bored seclusion until three spirits arrive to cheer her up. China’s premier avant-garde director, Li Liuyi is well known for using a wide range of Chinese operatic styles in the ‘new dramas’ he creates and although the name of this trilogy may suggest high action, it has more of a comedic feel with direct quotations from well known Chinese tales like The Peony Pavilion and Farewell My Concubine and slapstick action enjoyable by everyone.

The Liu Sola and Friends Ensemble and the Ensemble Modern of Germany offer their personal perspective on collective thinking and revolutionary life in modern China. Their Fantasy of the Red Queen is a kind of Brecht/Weill chamber opera on the overwhelming ambitions and dreams of a trench-coated ‘Red Queen’. And in keeping with the modern, jangling theme, the score borrows and mixes elements from traditional Chinese opera, Western contemporary music, Mandopop, blues and hip-hop; as we witness naked ambition transforming itself into self-absorption and madness.

Zuni Icosahedron presents a historical/educational/ experimental drama God Came to China, in which the religion of gentle Jesus arrives in China with guns, mathematics and the first Opium War. Brought to the stage by the same people who presented 1587 – A Year of No Significance, this is a glance at yet more turbulent times in China’s history through theatrical eyes. On & On Theatre are another local troupe in the festival – they join hands with Mobius Strip Theatre of Taiwan for an interpretation of In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, a masterpiece by the late French writer Bernard-Marie Koltes. Two strangers negotiate an unstated deal: the buyer never says – perhaps doesn’t know – what he wants, the seller never lets on what he is hawking. As these two ferret in each other’s mystery, the audience is taken on a ride into the “nature of desire”. Shakespeare becomes Chinese as film director Tsui Hark and the Contemporary Legend Theatre present a unique adaptation of The Tempest where love, duty, betrayal and mystical happenings defy rational thought.

For those who use an arts festival as an escape from the aches and pains of reality, Verbatim Theatre will be like a dash of cold water on the face. Aiming to give voice to those often voiceless, this type of theatre uses the precise words of interviewed people to explore social issues. BURST TV from London collaborates with Hong Kong-based Theatre du Pif in The Will to Build for a commentary by the people intimately involved in and affected by Hong Kong’s constructions. Theatre du Pif spoke with construction workers, architects, planners, preservation activists, politicians and feng shui masters (unfortunately Lee Ka-shing refused to participate) about Hong Kong’s urban heritage for a singularly appropriate festival closing presentation, both poetic and practical.

The New Vision Arts Festival runs from October 23 to November 23 at four venues. Tickets are from $120 to $1,380 at URBTIX, 2734 9009. For further details (including performance dates, times, venues and workshops), please refer to www.newvisionfestival.gov.hk