words rachel mok

Experimental theatre gets a boost with a new festival

The term ‘experimental theatre’ rings different bells for different people. For some it means cutting edge, inspiring performances, others immediately imagine an incomprehensible theatrical mess, but however you see it, the traditional ‘writer writes a script, director interprets it and performers do what they are told’ doesn’t get a look in. And that is just fine for the experimental young theatre enthusiasts in On & On Theatre Workshop’s first Sidekick Theatre Festival.

Last November, the festival called for proposals from teams of three for a performance between 60 and 120 minutes. Five teams were selected by the festival’s committee consisting of Chan Ping Chiu, artistic director of On & On and curator of the festival; theatre director/writer Paul Poon and Theatre du Pif’s artistic director Bonni Chan, all who will also act as mentors where necessary. Although On & On Theatre had organized similar projects in times gone by, they were forced to put them on hold when resources – particularly financial – dried up. Last year they finally received a grant from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and Sidekick became a reality.

Chan points out that Sidekick doesn’t subscribe to the traditional “single director per project”. Team members come from different disciplines – a team could consist of a lighting designer, a set designer and a video artist – but they may well change roles during creation and rehearsal and so learn from each other. ‘Eventually after the process, one – or maybe the three together – will be doing the director’s work,’ Chan says.

However, while the festival encourages such new thinking and experimentation, Chan is fully aware that has to be balanced with practicality. ‘We have to assess whether they are thinking too big and [their ideas are] becoming empty talk,’ he says. ‘We want to experiment, but we also want to be responsible to the audience. A lot of them want to explore on so many different levels – lighting, music, movement etc – their concept is complicated. Later they find out the execution is not as simple as they have written in their proposal, and they have to start again in rehearsal and creation.’ Not only is that a waste of time, it also inevitably means some squandering of the $40,000 each team is allocated to stage their production.

And if a watchful eye is needed, so is mentoring, though Chan says that in his experience peer mentoring is most effective. ‘Some of
the participants are very experienced already and I am not in a position to instruct them what to do. Also young artists often signify that they would like to do things themselves,’ he says. So he organized a series of pre-festival get-togethers in which the five groups could present and discuss their work with each other. He says that even though some tension may exist between the groups, when they observe each other’s work they relax and learning becomes more effective.

Chan notes that on the production and technical sides, theatre has become much more the domain of professionals, though he doubts whether that is true artistically. That makes it difficult for young directors with limited budgets to stage their plays, which is why he hopes the festival will become a regular event, ideally every two or three years. ‘But the ADC doesn’t have any long-term plans yet, so at the moment we don’t know what we can do.’

Festival Programme
bc also spoke to the five groups in the festival and, in our brief previews, each tells us what inspired their work.

Tides In Limbo
Chan Kwun-fee (director, text), Kwok Ka-yuen (vice director, movement director), Edwin Lo (sound artist)
June 19-21, 8pm
Tides in Limbo is a combination of sound, movement and dialogue exploring silence and a girl’s journey to find inner peace. Chan Kwun-fee: ‘The text for this performance came mainly from fragments I wrote during a trip to Turkey on my own. I was staying in a huge apartment by myself and it was so silent there – which made me feel lonely and uneasy. It was a very weird state of mind. Edwin, a sound artist, told me he has been using field recordings to investigate sound in empty space – which I think is very interesting. Ka-yuen, a dancer, wants to investigate the possibilities of his body movement without a heavy reliance on music.

Alice Dreamiosis
Wu May-bo (director/deviser/performer), Chau Ho-fan (movement director/deviser/performer), Adrian Yeung (text/video/performer)
June 26-28
In Susan Sontag’s play Alice in Bed, the main character is a fusion of Alice, novelist Henry James’ younger sister who suffered from depression, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Contrary to Sontag’s usual sharp and vivid writing, Alice in Bed is difficult to comprehend. Adrian Yeung: ‘I have seen an adaptation of Alice in Bed in Amsterdam, which used very powerful visual elements, and director May-bo has seen another version in Taiwan, which strictly followed the original text. That shows there are lots of possibilities in approaching the text. We are sticking with exploring its theme – the identity of women in today’s society, mental illness and solitude. There are certain flaws in the play, which we see as an intentional by the writer. Sontag is asking what a good script is – and if it is “bad”, do we need to fix it?’

Moomin Cafe episode 1224
Remu Iwai (director/deviser), Chan Wai-hung (text/deviser), Wu Li (art director/deviser)
July 3-5
This “fan fiction” is inspired by the Finnish comic strip/cartoon The Moomins. An internet café owner meets a traveller and a princess, and the three decide to travel to the dreamy and fairy Moomin Valley. Remu Iwai: ‘When I was a child, I knew the cartoon was on TV when my mum started cooking. That was the first time I saw a cartoon so slow, yet romantic. And it is based on daily life instead of some extravaganza. But we are not adapting the cartoon – we kind of hijack it, taking three characters or just their names. The team will discuss what the setting will be like and Wu Li, the art director, will draw the illustration and simulate us. The creation process is like playing ping-pong – our ideas bouncing between us and developing.’

Becoming Phaedra
Wong Yat-kwan (set and costume designer/deviser), Yeung Ysz-yan (lighting designer/deviser), Lai Yuk-ching (performer/deviser)
July 10-12
Derived from the feelings of the creative team in participating in Tang Shu Wing’s production of Phaedra, in Becoming Phaedra an actress is cast as Phaedra in the play, yet she doesn’t empathize with the character at all but has to convince herself to believe in it. She starts to have irrational thoughts and goes mentally out of control…

Yeung Ysz-yan: ‘We will start from a strong visual for this performance. For a play, usually the director takes the lead in the creative process and we [lighting and set designers] take part in later stages and work in more like supporting roles. This time we want to do it the other way round. We were excited that there are so many possibilities in staging the play, but then got a headache considering which one to use. But still it is great that we get to experiment.’

On Est Heureux a Cause de l’Amour
Chan Ming-fung (director), Tse Ngo-sheung (playwright), Wong Hung-fei (art director) July 17-19
Based on an unpublished novel by Tse, the play describes how, when H wakes up from sleep after breaking up with her boyfriend one night, she finds herself 12 years in the future. She meets her ex while he is masturbating in the library peeking at a young girl. The discovery of her ex’s dark secret binds the pair in a complex duet of love and lust. Chan Ming-fung: ‘After reading the novel, it kind of reminded me of the Japanese comic Detroit Metal City. We often have to do things we don’t want to do, and get on with people that we don’t like, which is like the male character – an erotomaniac – in the novel. Our art director is a photographer and has never been involved in theatre; the playwright has written a lot for school drama, yet this novel can never be used in schools. So to me, this project is more like a experiment about ourselves rather than us trying to produce experimental theatre.’

Tickets to each performance are $120, or consider a pass if you want to go to more than 3 performances - visit www.onandon.org.hk/sidekick for ticket info.