MACAUARTSFESTIVAL2009
words romana dalgleish

The Macau Arts Festival keeps getting bigger and better and this year the 20th edition has boosted its spending and almost doubled the number of acts compared to last year. Performances and exhibitions from around the world will be making their marks, and we have picked out a few highlights to lead you into the full programme, which you can find in bc’s listings.

If glitzy costumes, booming voices and a pinch of traditional culture sound appealing, you’ll enjoy Women Generals of the Yang Family. For those not familiar with the opera, it is an 800-year-old tale of national spirit and heroism in which two women, (one of them 100 years old) against all odds lead the Northern Song Army to success against invaders. The opera is presented by a young cast from the Little Plum Blossom Qinqiang Opera Troupe in a newly arranged version by playwrights Chen Yan and Hu Xiaoping. It will be performed on the May 27 at 8pm at the Macau Cultural Centre Grand Auditorium. Tickets are MOP$150, MOP$100 and MOP$60.

Cao Yu’s Sunrise, which plays out in the Macau Fringe Club, plots progressive moral degradation on the Mainland in the early half of last century. The play about the Kuomintang’s rule from 1931 until 1935 was published in 1936 and tells the stories of several women in Shanghai whose lives are disintegrating without affection or acknowledgement from the society around them. Cao Yu is often accredited with being the pioneer of spoken Chinese theatre. To see one of his more celebrated works, be at the Macau Cultural Centre Small Auditorium on either May 21 or 22 at 8pm. Tickets are MOP$100 and MOP$60.

In Ionesco’s Rhinoceros all but one man gradually turn into rhinoceroses. Which should be enough to indicate that this play was born out of the Theatre of the Absurd movement just after the Second World War. Ionesco wrote it as a critical response to the Nazism and Fascism of the time and the Theatre Farmers, Macau’s first local theatre company, are bringing it to the stage perhaps in an absurdist but pointed response to the less overt but nevertheless present fascisms of our time. The play runs at 8pm on May 6 at the Macau Cultural Centre Grand Auditorium. Tickets are MOP$150, MOP$100 and MOP$60.

As the title suggests, Silent Movie is evocative of the early 20th century film genre, especially as Davy and Kristin McGuire’s multimedia love story is viewed through small holes in the fourth wall of a huge wooden box. The McGuires use projections and live action, and complement this main presentation with A Study of Eating Habits, an interactive life-size walk-through video installation about eating as a catalyst for change in relationships. A Study of Eating Habits will run from May 23-28 and admission is free. Silent Movie will be performed on May 23, 24 and 28 with one performance every 30 minutes from 3-5:30pm and 7-9:30pm. Entry is MOP$10.

1927, a British theatre company that combines storytelling with animation, film, live music and performance, made a name for themselves at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival with Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a ‘theatrical cabaret’ in which the actors in black formal dress and white make-up take the mickey out of the silent film era with cartoonish acting and Buster Keaton-like antics. This huge crowd favourite of the British festival will be in Macau from May 8-10 at the Dom Pedro V Theatre at 8pm. Entry is MOP$40.

Contrary to the suggestion implied by the title of Quorum Ballet’s presentation Impacto, the Portuguese contemporary dance company’s work is known for its subtlety. The six dancers who make up the troupe have been working together since 2005 and in that time choreographer Daniel Cardoso has created eight works, Impacto being the most recent. Aimed at a younger audience, it is about the impact of change on people in the modern world and how technology and new forms of communication affect identity. Impacto opens at 8pm on May 12 at the Macau Cultural Centre Grand Auditorium. Admission is MOP$200, MOP$150 and MOP$100.

The theme of this year’s Macau Annual Art Exhibition is Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow as it aims to encourage open-mindednessπ and creativity in the local visual arts scene. All sorts of media have been used in the over 100 works on display, including traditional Chinese painting, poster design, seal-engraving and sculpture. Ten works selected from the exhibition will be held up as outstanding at the opening on May 15 from 10am-7pm. Admission is free. The first part of the exhibition will run from May 16 until July 5, then on July 9 the second part takes over and remains until August 16.

The Devil and Rhinoceros

Two performances at the 20th Macau Arts Festival step over the limits of conventional theatre

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea as a name for a theatre piece invokes all sorts of fantasies, and when I ask Suzanne Andrade why she gave that particular title to the theatre experience she and her company 1927 bring to the 20th Macau Arts Festival, her answer is equally intriguing. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘all the personas and characters in the show exist in this sort of none place, a strange place in between places. It also refers aesthetically and thematically to the devil and nautical scenes within the show.’

Andrade wrote, directed and now performs in the show which caused some enthusiastic turbulence at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007. It is based, she says, on a collection of performance poems that attempt to ‘scratch beneath the surface of the façade, see the ridiculous in the every day and the absurd in the mundane’. The actors, dressed in formal black but with all-white make-up relieved only by vivid red mouths, use techniques from the silent film era of the early 20th century in parody and mockery. ‘We toy with notions of persona. So we don’t play characters so much as heightened versions of ourselves, we are narrators and musicians. There are some characters in the show, and they exist in a satirical and perhaps even parallel society to our own,’ explains Andrade, who perhaps prophetically, started out in theatre as a dancing munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. And as the actors aren’t constrained by the conventions of what we normally think of as theatre, they don’t expect only a usual theatre-going crowd at their performances. Andrade describes their typical audience as ‘the type who go to comedy and cabaret and cinema; it’s one of 1927’s aims to appeal to a diverse audience.’

She spent two years creating Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, which, characteristically of 1927, relies on film and animation as much as on action and live music performance. That allowed not only the show to develop but also her part in it. ‘I think my role kept changing throughout,’ she says, ‘and I had the chance to spend time firstly on writing, then on delivery, so a lot of my own performance was in place before we began work on the show. This was very helpful and allowed me to focus more on music and performance and
animation direction.’

The time spent on the gestation of the show and a comment on the theatre website demonstrates another character trait of the writer/director. On the website, one of the wags of the company has written that if she was an animal it would most likely be a goat. When I ask about it, she laughs and says ‘I have a tendency to “butt” at things until I get my own way apparently!’

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea will be performed on May 8-10 at the Dom Pedro V Theatre at 8pm. Entry is MOP$40.
www.macauticket.com, Tel 2830 5083.

One of the local performances in this year’s Macau Arts Festival is Theatre Farmer’s rendition of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. In 2000, five theatre enthusiasts made local history by starting up a professional theatre company that in the words of Jacky Li, who plays the role of Berenger in Rhinoceros, aims to use theatre to ‘heighten the artistic quality of the local people, to widen the range of audience of the arts and to build up local cultural characteristic’.

Since then Theatre Farmers, not basing themselves in any one venue, have performed as an itinerant group anywhere in Macau they could get a big enough space and an audience. They are often found in schools, opening the eyes of students to all the excitement that theatre and performing skills have to offer. It hasn’t been an easy road. As Li says, ‘We haven’t always had a stable office and had to move over three times in 2002. We had to face the rising expense of office rental without any administration sponsorship before 2007.’
But things are improving as the theatre scene in Macau is ‘growing faster and becoming more specialized’.

Rhinoceros, Theatre Farmers’ contribution to the Macau Arts Festival, belongs to the Theatre of the Absurd and was written by Eugene Ionesco in 1959 as a response to the rise of pre-World War II Fascism and Nazism and the conformity that allowed them to spread. All the characters except the central Berenger, a kind of Everyman, turn into rhinoceroses in the course of the play, yet even Berenger is hardly a sympathetic character, being overly fond of drink and procrastination. Productions have been known to run at over two hours but Benjamin Wong has revised Ionesco’s script and cut the play down to 90 minutes for the Macau version.

The play has enjoyed something of a recent revival – originally produced in London’s Royal Court Theatre, it was staged there again to excellent reviews two years ago.It proves that there is more to it than just a comment on fascism. As Li says ‘the message of Rhinoceros is universal. I think that it is talking about human nature.’

One question Li avoids answering is how exactly the cast, bar Berenger, will be turned into rhinoceroses. Whether they will call on a bit of non-naturalism, body paint or detailed costumes – or even perhaps just a nasal horn and a lot of grunts – is being ‘kept secret’, so you will have to go to the theatre to find out.

Rhinoceros runs at 8pm on May 6 at the Macau Cultural Centre Grand Auditorium. Tickets are MOP$150, MOP$100 and MOP$60. www.macauticket.com, Tel 2830 5083