Spotlight, Tai Kwun’s annual season of performing arts, returns with a bunch of fresh, lively and thought-provoking shows, some of them making creative use of the variety of spaces scattered around the heritage compound. Rob Garratt reports. 

Tai Kwun began the sixth edition of Spotlight, the cultural compound’s annual performing arts season, with a simulated emergency. As immersive-performance arts stunts go, Geumhyung Jeong’s Fire Drill Scenario must rank among the most realistic as well as the most mundane. By beginning with a patience-testing, hourlong lecture on the heritage building’s fire safety equipment and escape protocols — delivered in a robotic monotone stripped of all emotion — the South Korean cross-media artist was surely making a comment on the growing instances of simulated enthusiasm displayed by artificial-intelligence voices. This was followed by a fleeting scene of warring robots, sudden flashes, darkness, sirens, and a real-life fire drill, with spectators shepherded by wardens to an assembly space in the courtyard, leading to a confused round of applause.

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Staged on March 26, Fire Drill Scenario set the tone for a performance series where the location is an integral part of the performance, in perpetual dialogue with the artists and audience members alike.

Tapestry of diversity

The season’s upcoming finale unfolds over two distinct spaces that will go through a makeover for the shows. Immersive dance spectacle On the Up Grade will see F Hall Studio and The Prison Yard transformed into “a futuristic pedestrian street where batik fabrics are shaped into a parade of human forms,” says Guangzhou-based dancer-choreographer ErGao.

“I lived on Huanshi Road in Guangzhou for more than 10 years, surrounded by a group of ‘familiar strangers’ with whom I never truly connected,” says the artist of the ethnically diverse population in his neighborhood. “That changed last year, when I stepped into Xiaobei Road, and gradually came to know this community where Africans, Middle Easterners, people from western China, and local residents live side by side.”

He saw these cultural connections manifest in the readily available traditional batik fabrics — made in China but bearing impressions of African, Indonesian and Indian cultures, suggesting a “cycle of replication and reinvention” and ultimately optimistically invoking a “vision of a future community, … a place where everyone holds their own colorful story, and where coming together means sharing those stories with one another”.

Moving spaces

Making use of the heritage building’s found spaces is a recurring feature of Spotlight’s programming, underscoring the redeveloped arts complex’s former life as a police station, courthouse and prison. The staging of the Tai Kwun-commissioned Songs of Being was also divided between two different venues, bringing to life the contrasting sides of British romantic poet William Blake’s most famous work. Songs of Innocence and Experience was set to music by Hong Kong composer Daniel Lo, and performed by the vocal group NOEMA, from April 8 through Thursday. A female chorus performed the optimistic songs of “innocence” in the acoustically pure environment of the purpose-built JC Cube, while standing amid the imperfect brick walls of F Hall Studio, male singers sang from “experience”.

“The two performing spaces have completely different characters,” notes Lo, who originally planned to present the entire set of songs in a single location. “As well as the architecture, they have very different sound qualities, which brought out something different in the voices,” he adds. “In the end, it just clicked.”

Spotlight’s three-part Play Reading series saw dramatic scripts presented as in-development works, in a trio of curated environments. Notably, Jason Lam cast members of the pop-rock band RubberBand, staged a silent disco and used film projections to bring his film script for Small Town Boys to life on the alfresco Laundry Steps. The same outdoor venue also serves the contemporary dance double bill Between Selves, featuring works by Hong Kong-born dancer-choreographer Cola Ho and Guangzhou-native Liu Qingyu.

“It’s so special that they could make use of this space, this existing actual environment, to add a layer of atmosphere to the audience experience,” says Linda Yip, Tai Kwun’s head of performing arts.

Positive energy

A converted heritage complex, Tai Kwun houses only one purpose-built performance space — JC Cube. Senior producer Mimi Lam admits that when Spotlight began in 2021, having to make use of the compound’s outdoor spaces for staging shows was challenging.

Over time, the programming team realized that the variety of spaces scattered around the redeveloped heritage compound lend themselves well to experimental and interdisciplinary performances. “And this is why with Spotlight, we always try to encourage the artists to try something new within the safe haven of this enclosed space,” Lam says.

Artists commissioned to produce new works are actively encouraged to “explore new artistic possibilities by breaking free from the traditional form of the space,” says Yip. By engaging the space and its history in the artistic process, “we realize that there is so much potential offered within all of these constraints,” says Lam, adding that often artists are inspired to find creative solutions to work their way around such limitations.

“I believe that it’s through this kind of experimentation that more and more different works will be in the market,” she adds. “Because in the past, there were not many venues like ours.”

Not lying still

Spotlight 2026 is hosting Tai Kwun’s first international commission. To be staged from Thursday through April 26 in both English and Cantonese versions, one-man play The Liar is the result of a collaboration between Danish theater director Tue Biering and Hong Kong actor Chan Tai-yin, developed playfully over a period of several years.

Biering became fascinated with the art of deception around a decade ago, when the phrase “fake news” gained traction. Yet the world of theater he inhabits is by definition one of make-believe. “For some reason, you think that an actor on stage — because he’s real and you are together in the same room — is truer than something you experience on digital media,” he explains. “Well, that’s a lie, because theater has always been about performance.”

On stage, Chan delivers a first-person narrative describing the life of a Hong Kong actor who shares his name, and yet as the show’s title suggests, departures from the truth soon mount up.

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“We speculate on things that could happen in my life, the fluidity of identity,” says Chan. The uncertainty about the narrative should prompt viewers to probe their own perceptions of memory and truth, and the blurred lines between embellishment and falsehood. “We’re prompting people to think about, ‘Well, how do you tell your own story?’ You always have various versions,” Chan says. “It’s about how you construct yourself, about the dramaturgy of life and storytelling.”

The show’s title alone provokes a sense of complicity between the performer and spectators, “like lovers who, in the first few months of a relationship, are playing guessing games,” says Biering. “But they are enjoyable guessing games.”

With a healthy dose of humor promised, ultimately then, “it doesn’t really matter how much it’s true or not — it’s whether the audience enjoys being lied to,” adds the director. “And they must — otherwise they will just leave.”

If you go

Spotlight: a Season of Performing Arts

Dates: Between Selves, through Saturday;

Play Reading, through Tuesday;

The Liar, Thursday through April 26;

On the Up Grade, April 30-May 3.

Venue: Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central

www.taikwun.hk/

The writer is a freelance contributor to China Daily.