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Hong Kong in festive mood
Letâs get the party started: The West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre is held at the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, where viewers can enjoy the stunning backdrop of Victoria Harbor
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span class="inline inline-none">Let's get the party started: The West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre is held at the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, where viewers can enjoy the stunning backdrop of Victoria Harbor.
Choreographed by Chloe Wong, also one of the dancers, Heaven Behind the Door is a dance about the meeting of 'two halves of one's soul'.
The dance is one of a series of five in the Hong Kong Jockey Club's Contemporary Dance Series, a program comprising as many as 50 musical, theatrical, dance and opera programs for the upcoming 42nd Hong Kong Arts Festival, slated for Feb. 18 to March 23.
The London Symphony Orchestra, the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, the Akram Khan Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, the Guerzenich Orchestra Cologne are among the international participants in the festival.
Hong Kong artists will be represented by Cantonese operas and dramas in the festival's New Stage Series, which will stage four plays in Mandarin and Cantonese except for FILTH (Failed in London, Try Hong Kong), which is the first English-language play commissioned and produced by the Hong Kong Arts Festival.
'We've also invited Asia Pacific choreographers to take part in the festival to show people that it is not only about Europe and America. We want to show what is here in Hong Kong and Asia,' said So Kwok-wan, the associate program director at the Hong Kong Arts Festival Society.
What made the festival more interesting was that it would present exclusively 'only-seen-in-Hong-Kong' art performances, So said.
'As in our festival you can see a lot of big shows that you won't be able to see in any cities in Asia except in our festival. One of them is a rarely staged performance of Pina Bausch's signature dance opera Iphigenia in Tauris as a timely tribute to the 300th anniversary of Christoph Willibald Gluck's birth,' So said.
First held in 1973, the festival has grown into a renowned performing-arts festival in Asia, this year showcasing 55 international and Hong Kong artists in 138 performances that will take place in 14 arts venues spread all over Hong Kong.
According to data from the Hong Kong Arts Festival Society, the festival's audience has grown steadily in the last 10 years from an initial 100,000 to 150,000 per year.
So said that Hong Kong wanted to be an international arts city where people from all over the world visited for its arts events. The massive construction of new art venues, he said, led to the increasing popularity of performing arts in Hong Kong, which is still on a journey to find its optimum status. 'Maybe in the future people will come to Hong Kong purposely only to see art,' So Kwokwan said.
Besides the 42nd Hong Kong Arts Festival, the city of over 7 million inhabitants has been organizing the West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre to celebrate Chinese (Lunar) New Year, which fell on Jan. 31 this year. Having commenced in Jan. 17, the West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre will last until Feb. 9.
The festival, held annually since 2012, features two months of Chinese operas and dramas (xiqu) of different genres. The theater is held at the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, where visitors can enjoy the stunning backdrop of Victoria Harbor.
'Bamboo theater is part of the precious cultural heritage of Hong Kong. From a larger cultural perspective, bamboo theater carries not only the history, but also the spirit of Chinese xiqu culture.
Hong Kong is one of the few places that still retain the tradition of bamboo theater today,' said Louis Yu, the performing arts executive director of West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, after the opening ceremony.
All the performances will be in Cantonese but international audiences will be provided with English translations on big screens near the stage.
The 2,700 square-meter theater was constructed traditionally using around 1,000 fir trees and over 12,000 bamboo stalks, making it the biggest bamboo theater ever built in the history of Hong Kong.
'It is something of a luxury to keep this kind of tradition in the midst of the fast-growing modernity of Hong Kong. So, this is a unique experience for tourists to see Hong Kong as the city where the old meets the new,' Louis said.
The writer recently visited Hong Kong at the invitation of the city's tourism board
Photos by Haeril Halim
