No Foreigners is Hong Kong Exile's second major production to open in Vancouver in the past two weeks (I previously reviewed Foxconn Frequency [No. 3] here). The busy and artistically adventurous company continues its multidisciplinary exploration of diasporic Chineseness, this time in collaboration with Toronto-based fu-Gen Theatre's David Yee, who wrote the text. Originally commissioned by Theatre Conspiracy as part of its Migration Path Project, No Foreigners runs under the direction of HKE project lead Milton Lim at The Cultch's Culture Lab until February 17, before traveling to Toronto for a run at the Theatre Centre.
The story concerns an unnamed Asian-Canadian millennial (voiced by Derek Chan) who is neither fully assimilated into mainstream white culture nor conversant with the traditions of his Cantonese mother and grandfather. He discovers just how estranged he is from both parts of himself when he visits that quintessential global export: the Chinese mall. Wishing to browse among the Hermes bags at an upscale boutique called Milan Station, he is denied entry by the ancient storeowner (April Leung), who insists that "No foreigners are allowed!" Affronted by this attack on his cultural identity, and additionally spurred by the news that his grandfather has left him his estate, but only on the condition that he can supply the probate officer the correct codeword, our hero embarks on a three-year occupation of the mall in an effort to become authentically Chinese. His guide and mentor on this journey is the wise-beyond-her-years Sodapop Mah, the fugitive daughter of a bickering couple whose electronics business is all but bust.
All of this provides HKE and writer Yee with ample opportunity to open up the surreal space of the Chinese mall to theatrical exploitation and critical analysis, giving us a portrait of a place where fantasy and superstition intersect--sometimes sweetly, at other times more violently--with commerce and the geopolitics of fashion and pop culture. The anthropologist Marc Augé has described the shopping mall as a "non-place," a transient space of "supermodernity" that holds little cultural or architectural significance for its users, who consequently remain anonymous and indistinguishable within it. What is most compelling about No Foreigners is the suggestion that this is far from the case for Chinese malls of the sort one finds in Richmond or Markham. Instead, we learn that they are vital community gathering places, rich in drama, haunted by history, and deeply connected to the idea of a home away from home.
My problem has to do with how all of this is presented. Performers Derek Chan and April Leung function as a cross between voice actors and Bunraku puppet masters, moving miniature human figures and set pieces in front of a bank of computer screens, the projected images of which we then see transposed via live camera feeds to a larger movie screen (the miniatures are by Natalie Tin Yin Gan, the projections by Lim, working with Remy Siu, who also designed the sound). Our perspective as spectators is at once multiplied and telescoped all at once, and the seamless integration of the technology is on one level a marvel to behold--as, for example, with the fluttering of an eclipse of moths that begins on the smaller bank of computer screens and then migrates to overtake the whole of the larger movie screen. And yet while I appreciate how dispersed and multi-focal viewing in No Foreigners mimics the ways in which seeing has become split and distracted in today's media-saturated environments--of which the shopping mall is paradigmatic--as live theatre this production feels strangely static and emotionally inert. Despite all of the illuminated screens and the images and the translated surtitles being thrown at me, I found myself continuously looking to Chan and Leung, crouched below the computers and platforms of miniatures, speaking almost surreptitiously into their head mics. And it's surely no coincidence that the moment in the production that connects the most with the audience is when Chan--his character having graduated to the ultimate test of his Chineseness--breaks out into a rousing karaoke number, a single spot following him as he makes his way into the audience.
Yee's text is filled with beautiful poetry, and there are so many smart and interesting things going on in No Foreigners. I just wish they could break free a bit more often from the apparatus of their mediatic scaffolding.
P
Showing posts with label Hong Kong Exile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hong Kong Exile. Show all posts
Friday, February 9, 2018
Saturday, February 3, 2018
PuSh 2018: Foxconn Frequency (No. 3) at Performance Works
Last night was a double-header at the PuSh Festival. It started at Performance Works, with local collective Hong Kong Exile's latest genre-defying work. In Foxconn Frequency (No. 3): For Three Visibly Chinese Performers, HKE project lead Remy Siu uses game systems software to drill three pianists (fellow HKE member Natalie Tin Yin Gan, the classically trained Vicky Chow, and a young male prodigy who unfortunately is not named) in various keyboard exercises. They do so while sitting in front of computer monitors hooked up to 3-D printers (the inclusion of which I did not fully understand). As they complete the exercises they have been assigned, a live camera feed projects their images on the screen behind them, a red countdown clock indicating the time in which they have to complete the task, and a white line showing the progress of their labour (the projections, including brilliantly edited satellite map images, are by HKE member Milton Lim). If the performers fail to complete their exercises in the assigned time, or if they make a mistake along the way, a red Chinese character will flash on the screen. If they succeed, a white character will appear.
Over the course of the work's 80 minutes, the repetition of this conceit moves from being dramatically compelling to being sensorily overwhelming and exhausting to being just plain boring, sometimes within the space of only a few minutes. In this, the "theatre" of human-machine interface that Siu and his collaborators create in this piece presumably mimics the conditions of factory-line assembly at any one of the plants owned by the real Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer (its clients include Apple and Sony), with the company's Shenzhen location having attracted worldwide attention for a spate of worker suicides. Competition is, of course, what structures most of the action in this work: the performers are playing against the computer, but also each other, and the countdown clocks, combined with the complexity of the exercises, ramp up the dramatic stakes. I was especially drawn in at one point when Gan kept failing at a particularly tricky passage; she had to do it over and over again until she got it right, and by the end the relief in my own body when she finally succeeded was physically palpable. It's perhaps to be expected that the professional pianist, Chow, would have the lowest failure count by the end of the piece; that said, at the beginning of Foxconn the young boy--a model of cool calm throughout--was more than keeping his own.
The work is not entirely cutthroat. At various moments, the pianists are required to collaborate, with Gan and the young boy, positioned on either side of Chow, performing one passage repeatedly, eventually finding the required synchronicity in their timing. And even more interesting is when, after the boy has mysteriously opted out of the game altogether by leaving the stage (perhaps a comment on child labour or on the suicides of young Foxconn workers), Chow and Gan work to game the system itself, deliberately failing at their assigned tasks. The somewhat heavy hand of social commentary that gets imposed at the end of the piece, including a projection of a poem by Xu Lizhi, a writer and Foxconn worker who committed suicide, suggests that there is still some work to be done integrating medium and message, especially in terms of implicating and involving the audience. To this end, I wonder if in future iterations of Foxconn Frequency (will there be a number 4?) whether an immersive and interactive stage design might not be something to explore. That the audience was invited to tour the performers' play stations after the end of the performance suggests the potential in such an option.
P
Over the course of the work's 80 minutes, the repetition of this conceit moves from being dramatically compelling to being sensorily overwhelming and exhausting to being just plain boring, sometimes within the space of only a few minutes. In this, the "theatre" of human-machine interface that Siu and his collaborators create in this piece presumably mimics the conditions of factory-line assembly at any one of the plants owned by the real Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer (its clients include Apple and Sony), with the company's Shenzhen location having attracted worldwide attention for a spate of worker suicides. Competition is, of course, what structures most of the action in this work: the performers are playing against the computer, but also each other, and the countdown clocks, combined with the complexity of the exercises, ramp up the dramatic stakes. I was especially drawn in at one point when Gan kept failing at a particularly tricky passage; she had to do it over and over again until she got it right, and by the end the relief in my own body when she finally succeeded was physically palpable. It's perhaps to be expected that the professional pianist, Chow, would have the lowest failure count by the end of the piece; that said, at the beginning of Foxconn the young boy--a model of cool calm throughout--was more than keeping his own.
The work is not entirely cutthroat. At various moments, the pianists are required to collaborate, with Gan and the young boy, positioned on either side of Chow, performing one passage repeatedly, eventually finding the required synchronicity in their timing. And even more interesting is when, after the boy has mysteriously opted out of the game altogether by leaving the stage (perhaps a comment on child labour or on the suicides of young Foxconn workers), Chow and Gan work to game the system itself, deliberately failing at their assigned tasks. The somewhat heavy hand of social commentary that gets imposed at the end of the piece, including a projection of a poem by Xu Lizhi, a writer and Foxconn worker who committed suicide, suggests that there is still some work to be done integrating medium and message, especially in terms of implicating and involving the audience. To this end, I wonder if in future iterations of Foxconn Frequency (will there be a number 4?) whether an immersive and interactive stage design might not be something to explore. That the audience was invited to tour the performers' play stations after the end of the performance suggests the potential in such an option.
P
Saturday, April 16, 2016
FUSE: This is Now at the VAG
I haven't been to a FUSE in a while and despite my difficulties in shaking this cold I'm currently battling, last night I made sure to haul myself to the latest iteration. This only partly had to do with getting a first glimpse of the current MashUp show on at the VAG--about which I have been hearing such wildly divergent things. (I'll have to go back more than once in the coming weeks to judge for myself.) I was mostly inspired by the fact that this latest iteration of FUSE was curated by Joyce Rosario, Associate Curator at the PuSh Festival. And that it featured some of my favourite local artists.
In "Backing it Up," Justine A. Chambers took the sometimes maligned, often overlooked role of the back-up dancer and moved it centre stage--or at least into a corner alcove on the second floor of the gallery, a nice bit of (de)focalization that hints at various overlapping ideas of recessiveness at play in this ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon. That is, the whole raison-d'être of back-up dancers is to recede into the distance; at the same time, no matter the dominant celebrity parent they are working for, there appears to be a standard repertoire of moves that they all inherit. Chambers plays with this by building her score on a basic step-touch sequence. To a loop of classic Motown tunes, a gaggle of Modus Operandi dancers shift their weight from one leg to the other and snap their fingers in time to the music, occasionally changing their facings and group formations. But then something far more interesting starts to happen: entropy inserts itself within this simple bit of unison. The automatic--and automaton-like--steps and snaps dissolve into a chaotic riot of off-beat tics and awkward, non-synchronous gestures, the various head shakes and eye rolls and face brushes refusing to be disciplined by an imposed technique of anonymous legibility, and imposing instead 20+ separate scores that say: "Look at me, see me, I am a body that matters--even here, in the back row."
Circling briefly around Natalie Gan's "Chinese Vaginies" (which already by 8:30 had a long waitlist), I made my way briefly to the third floor annex to take in Remy Siu's "New Eyes-Study #2," an impressive immersive installation of light and sound and smoke. Then it was up to the fourth floor for fellow Hong Kong Exile member Milton Lim's "okay.odd," an eye-popping and satirical video take on the practice of mindful meditation and linguistic free association.
I spent the most time in the adjacent rooftop pavilion, where the musician and DJ Kareem Abdul Jabaastard and the dance artist Deana Peters/Mutable Subject (together with friends, including Elissa Hanson and Kristina Lemieux and Alexa Mardon) were throwing a dance party called "This is Not a Performance!" With an amazing playlist of song mash-ups and an equally amazing view of the city, it was hard to resist this particular groove.
P.
In "Backing it Up," Justine A. Chambers took the sometimes maligned, often overlooked role of the back-up dancer and moved it centre stage--or at least into a corner alcove on the second floor of the gallery, a nice bit of (de)focalization that hints at various overlapping ideas of recessiveness at play in this ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon. That is, the whole raison-d'être of back-up dancers is to recede into the distance; at the same time, no matter the dominant celebrity parent they are working for, there appears to be a standard repertoire of moves that they all inherit. Chambers plays with this by building her score on a basic step-touch sequence. To a loop of classic Motown tunes, a gaggle of Modus Operandi dancers shift their weight from one leg to the other and snap their fingers in time to the music, occasionally changing their facings and group formations. But then something far more interesting starts to happen: entropy inserts itself within this simple bit of unison. The automatic--and automaton-like--steps and snaps dissolve into a chaotic riot of off-beat tics and awkward, non-synchronous gestures, the various head shakes and eye rolls and face brushes refusing to be disciplined by an imposed technique of anonymous legibility, and imposing instead 20+ separate scores that say: "Look at me, see me, I am a body that matters--even here, in the back row."
Circling briefly around Natalie Gan's "Chinese Vaginies" (which already by 8:30 had a long waitlist), I made my way briefly to the third floor annex to take in Remy Siu's "New Eyes-Study #2," an impressive immersive installation of light and sound and smoke. Then it was up to the fourth floor for fellow Hong Kong Exile member Milton Lim's "okay.odd," an eye-popping and satirical video take on the practice of mindful meditation and linguistic free association.
I spent the most time in the adjacent rooftop pavilion, where the musician and DJ Kareem Abdul Jabaastard and the dance artist Deana Peters/Mutable Subject (together with friends, including Elissa Hanson and Kristina Lemieux and Alexa Mardon) were throwing a dance party called "This is Not a Performance!" With an amazing playlist of song mash-ups and an equally amazing view of the city, it was hard to resist this particular groove.
P.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
