Editor’s Note: West Kowloon recently staged a new performance piece, Hello, Baoyu. Loosely adapted from the mid-18th century Chinese classic, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin, Hello, Baoyu is an outstanding production for many reasons, not the least because it marks the return of leading Hong Kong dance exponent and director of City Contemporary Dance Company, Yuri Ng, to the performance arena after many years.
In this immersive show, one of the performers joins virtually from Taiwan while the other shares a space with a continuously-moving audience. Simultaneously with the live action, large screens mounted at either end of the theater play different iterations of the story of the two Baoyus who could be alter egos or two faces of the same person.
After watching the show where several elements came in twos, China Daily had a number of questions for the co-directors of the production — Edward Lam, artistic director of Edward Lam Dance Theatre and Low Kee Hong, head of theatre, Performing Arts, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority. Here are the answers they came up with.
Key players in the Hello, Baoyu team include (from left to right) co-director Low Kee Hong, performer Yuri Ng, co-director Edward Lam and performer Wang Hung-yan. (PHOTO COURTESY: WEST KOWLOON CULTURAL DISTRICT AUTHORITY)
Most people today lead two lives — as the physical flesh and blood human being and the virtual-digital avatar. The pandemic has underscored the very fraught nature of this dual existence and the inter-relationships between our dual selves, which might be one of the themes Hello, Baoyu is trying to explore among others. I am wondering if the pandemic was an immediate trigger for wanting to stage this production.
Low Kee Hong: While the conditions of the pandemic did impact the process of the production, say for example our performer-collaborator Wang Hung-yuan was not able to physically come to Hong Kong for the performance, I wouldn’t say that it was the immediate trigger to making the work. The collaboration between Edward and I started way back in 2015 when we met to discuss the possibilities of creating a new platform built around scenography that led to “What is Stage.” In co-curating this platform, we often had conversations that ranged from philosophy, phenomenology, psychology, sociology, architecture, design, visual arts, queer theories, and literature. These conversations and explorations into rethinking the futures of “live” performance fed directly into the making of Hello, Baoyu.
I think especially now, most people lead more than two lives, but very often the construction of our current realities underscores the deference to binaries. Hence in Hello, Baoyu, we wanted to puncture this reality (in order) to reopen our sensitivities to the polyvocal, to the multiplicities of ourselves and plurality of our experiences.
Hello, Baoyu underscores the co-existence of the physical and digital realms in the same space and their inter-relationships. (PHOTO COURTESY: WEST KOWLOON CULTURAL DISTRICT AUTHORITY)
The Jia Baoyu-Zhen Baoyu doppelganger theme in The Dream of the Red Chamber sounds more like a 20th-century modernist Western trope rather than a piece of artifice in a mid-18th century Chinese novel. Would you like to tell us what appeals to you the most about this idea with an example of how you went about giving it form and shape on stage?
Low: It is interesting that an 18th-Century novel from China seem to already talk about 20th-Century Western modernist conceptions of the self. The Dream of the Red Chamber is one of the four great classic novels in the Chinese-speaking world. For me, even though it details life in 18th-Century Qing Dynasty, it is very much a contemporaneous reflection on psychoanalysis, social structures, hierarchy, class, familial responsibilities — a magnum opus to think about “who am I” and “the self.”
The device of the double and by extension the mirror and reflection are ways for us to encounter the forgotten selves that have become unfamiliar either by distance or rejection. In Hello, Baoyu, the two massive screens function as a dual mirror device but very quickly you realize that the reflections are not always direct because there are multiple gazes during the experience of the work. You become aware of how you are looking at the images as other audiences are also looking at you looking at the images, and of course vice versa.
Then there are the performer-collaborators: Yuri, who is in the space with the audiences, while Hung-yuan is in Taipei, being able to look at the audiences looking at the images and each other. These rhizomatic systems of looking and being looked at expands the discovery of the multiple selves while exploding assumptions of which one we think is authentic and true.
The final images that stays with the audience — that of the two performers moving away from the scene, with their backs to the audience — seem to underscore the idea of renunciation and letting go of worldly possessions and ties, like in the novel. Is the use of nudity meant to play up this idea? How is nudity essential to this production?
Low: The poem Clinging Vine, taken from Chapter 22 of The Dream of the Red Chamber is heard just before Yuri re-enters the space stark naked, close to the end of the piece. The poem references the moment of renunciation by Jia Baoyu as he prepares to enter a life of monkhood. While the presence of the naked body symbolically deals with that moment of letting go, the naked body of Yuri semiotically creates the discourse of a body trained in the rigor of ballet dealing with the process of aging and then finding transcendence as the dancer rediscovers new ways of accessing his muscle memory to move in ways not possible before. All of this happens while audiences are watching Yuri in that final movement explosion, naked.
Inspired by Cao Xueqin’s mid-18th century novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, Hello, Baoyu is a two-hander performed by Yuri Ng and Wang Hung-yan. (PHOTO COURTESY: WEST KOWLOON CULTURAL DISTRICT AUTHORITY)
I found the use of peephole images and the way they were manipulated quite interesting. Was it meant to underscore the ideas of isolation and voyeurism — two states of being that are increasingly more common in modern life?
Edward Lam: When we were constructing the visual narratives, the video director and editor Darwin Ng experienced a process of defining and re-defining the meaning of the images. At first, before the peephole idea was formed, the original video was merely a documentation of the improvisation by the two actors. One might interpret their relationship by watching the physical interactions between them. But the real significance of their relationship lies not in just the two actors alone, but also involves the spectators.
Being intimate or vulnerable in relationships is being seen as taboo in our daily lives, and we are constantly looking for a safe position in any type of connections we have with others. And that’s how the peephole idea comes into play. Also, right from the beginning we know that the two screens are mirrors which respond to each other. So although we see the same actors in each peephole, they are in different costumes, and very different state of emotions. Because of these differences, we have to make a decision as to which of the relationships shown on the screens we are going to participate in — whether to be more isolated or more engaged; more into oneself or more interactive with the other person. And if we find ourselves jumping between the two, the awareness of doing so would help us peep into our subconscious selves. So the peephole is not one for the external world, but an internal, psychological and self-reflexive one.
What was the logic behind the use of high-decibel sound, strong lights and volleys of smoke to create effects that were deliberately jarring? How do these add to the viewers' experience?
Low: The contemporary experience is one that is constantly jarring to the point that we have become quite numb and desensitized to the non-stop bombardment of images, sounds, smells and touch. To enter the theatre for us is not a moment of suspension of reality into a constructed illusion.
The dream chapters in Hello, Baoyu are intentionally multiple moments of destabilizing audiences to assess and reassess what they think is real. To wake from the slumber of numbness we feel is critical to the experience of the work when audiences need to constantly assess and make choices for themselves as to what they are really seeing, hearing, feeling, touching and doing.
At a time when the Hong Kong government is keen to support "Art Tech" projects, one expects to see use of technology in performance art in a way that goes beyond creating spectacles. I’m excited when I see the application of technology pushing the audience into actively engaging with the creative process, applying a degree of intellectual rigor in choosing and editing out parts of the material presented to them, being increasingly aware of the creative and technical processes involved and the dynamic shared between the two. In a nutshell, I would like to see the use of technology making the experience of art more meaningful. Please could you share your thoughts on the subject, in relation to Hello, Baoyu or in general?
Lam: Even a painting, or photograph, can trigger active engagement on the part of the audiences. This is more about how spiritual the communication of the work is. But at a time when sensory stimuli are so heavily emphasized, we are more prone to relying on technology to make us active, instead of being active ourselves, regardless of the form. By “being active ourselves,” I mean considering how much we contextualize our experiences, and that has so much to do with how sensitive we are to time and space. We are relying so much on technology to construct a sense of time and a sense of space, because technology is so good at creating instantaneity, that is the feeling of “now” and “nowness”. This is only because we are losing memory in an unprecedented rate, because everything appears and disappears so quickly that our emotions cannot catch up with this speed, and thus we cannot position ourselves in relation to the world and others. This is also why the reality in our time is not something that helps us find the meaning of our existence. For example, if we were to meet with someone and chat for an hour, many of us would not find this experience worthwhile. Because during the same period of time, we can connect with more than one person, thus creating an illusion of ourselves being seen and heard by many others. This is precisely the paradox we are all in. Technology seems to help us connect with so many others in any part of the world, but we are often more alone and feel unsatisfied in such “connections”. While concentrating on one person in a relationship, we are in constant fear that this might end any time and we would lose everything at once. Technology doesn’t necessarily help one build a long-lasting and deep relationship, but on the other hand, humanity doesn’t guarantee maximizing our achievements given the limited resources, which is an anxiety of the modern man. And this is the dilemma we face all the time.
We are never 100 percent actively engaged in anything. The active engagements made possible through the use of technology are sometimes merely an illusion. While technology seems to make us more and more omnipotent, at the same time we feel ever more lonely and isolated, and hence restless as technology advances. Performing arts to me is a journey of coming face-to-face with loneliness, or being alone with oneself. Expressing oneself is a very personal experience. So the role of technology here is not only to be a part of the services but also serve as a tool for self-discovery and self-criticism. No matter how advanced technologies are and how impactful the effect they create, to me the key is to go back to a very fundamental purpose: technology is not a means to surprise or excite the audience, but to create an awakening in oneself, about the eternal philosophical question: Who am I?
Interviewed by Chitralekha Basu
(The answers were lightly edited for the sake of enhanced clarity.)
