“SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts” Returns with Seven Spectacular Multi-Disciplinary Programmes from Hong Kong and the Mainland’s finest artists
28 Feb 2023, TuesdayTai Kwun is delighted to announce the return of SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts, which will showcase seven versatile performing arts programmes from April through May 2023. The programmes offer a wide spectrum of culture and talents from Hong Kong and the Mainland at Tai Kwun's distinctive venues and outdoor spaces, enabling talented local artists to produce work that is unique in nature with a focus on audience engagement, evolution and continuity.
This season’s SPOTLIGHT features original productions by all-new talent and returning artists who delighted audiences in 2021, continuing Tai Kwun’s dedication to establishing close and lasting collaborative relationships with artists in the performing arts community. Following Tri Ka Tsai and LauZone, multi-talented music artists Anna Lo and Rick Lau continue with the poignant yet playful The Farewell Comeback Tour, the third and final episode of the Hong Kong-style cabaret trilogy that sings tribute to the language and slang that shape the city’s generational identity. Choreographer and dancer Gigi Yang and visual artist Chow Chun Fai give witness to the stories in our lives through dance, images, and sound with The Forgiving Trees. Meanwhile, music and installations performance Since When, guided by the text of Chow Yiu Fai, music of Joyce Tang, visuals and installations of Chan Wai Lap and performances of iii (Iris Liu), Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and a choir of young signers, invites audiences to reclaim their lost sounds. Presenting tales of the diasporic community awash in magic realism, Guangzhou choreographer He Qiwo (ErGao) presents Butterfly Island, while playwright Chan Kwan Yee and director Yan Pat To make their collaborative debut with I will die in my home, a story told from the perspective of three generations of Hong Kong women about ancestral homes. Spanning across Tai Kwun is site-specific theatre The Sublime Progressions by award-winning Vividly, which takes theatregoers on an intimate journey of migration and diaspora that traverses time and space. Finally, the HKAPA drama students continue their work Last Ride, Fresh Eyes, developed in 2022 and enthrals with a podcast that encourages the audience to listen closely to the faint echoes and whispers of the city as they rally together support for Hong Kong artists.
Stretching across four weeks, SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts invites
arts lovers and audiences across the city to celebrate the very best of performing artists inside Tai Kwun’s iconic and dazzling venues.
【Hong Kong-style Cabaret】The Farewell Comeback Tour │ 07–09.04.2023
A diva is preparing for her final show as her swan song…or is she? Following the critically acclaimed productions Tri Ka Tsai and LauZone created in Tai Kwun Performing Arts Season in 2019 and 2021, music artists Anna Lo and Rick Lau continue their musical odyssey in The Farewell Comeback Tour, the third and final instalment of the Hong Kong-style cabaret trilogy that examines our generational identity crisis through the evolution of language and slang. With playful music and drama, the show will tug at your heartstrings and tickle your funny bone.
Date & Time: 07 April 2023, 8pm; 08–09 April 2023, 3pm and 8pm
Venue: JC Cube, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$280
【Dance X Moving Images X Sound】The Forgiving Trees │ 07–09.04.2023
In her first collaboration with Tai Kwun, dance artist Gigi Yang teams up with visual artist Chow Chun Fai, moving image designer Wilfred Wong and soundscape designer Lawrence Lau to create The Forgiving Trees, which transforms Tai Kwun's F Hall Studio into a new realm through dance, visuals, and music. The audience is encouraged to move around the F Hall Studio space to fully experience the immersive fusion of dance, moving images, and music.
Date & Time: 07–08 April 2023, 2pm and 7pm; 09 April 2023, 2pm
Venue: F Hall Studio, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$280
【Music x Installations】Since When │ 14–17.04.2023
Since When invites Tai Kwun audiences to embark on a quest of seeking, finding, remembering, imagining – hopefully recognising – and reclaiming what used to belong to us. The production, a music and installation project in search of the lost voice, is the first lyrical and musical collaboration between lyricist Chow Yiu Fai and composer Joyce Tang. Together with visual artist Chan Wai Lap, singer iii (Iris Liu), Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and a team of young singers and sound archivers who will bring audience to various locations at Tai Kwun with theatrical experiences of the journey of lost and found.
Date & Time: 14 April 2023, 8pm; 15–16 April 2023, 4pm and 8pm; 17 April 2023, 8pm
Venue: JC Cube and Tai Kwun site-wide
Ticket: HK$280
【Dance Theatre】Butterfly Island │ 15–16.04.2023
Butterfly Island is the brainchild of the quirky and charismatic choreographer He Qiwo (ErGao), who is regarded as one of the Mainland’s brightest stars in contemporary dance. After hisproduction of Disco-teca blended visuals, installations and dance with kitsch-chic in Tai Kwun in 2018, ErGao has assembled a sizable number of visuals on diaspora for his most recent work, Butterfly Island, which features dancers from the millennial to Gen Z generations. Various spaces of Tai Kwun will be transformed into a “synthesise scene” for performances enveloped in magical realism, telling the tales of the fictional island nestled between the discordant past and unresolved future, where people from different regions and eras meet and bid farewell to each other, just as butterflies’ momentary encounters.
Date & Time: 15–16 April 2023, 1pm and 6pm
Venue: Prison Yard & F Hall Studio, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$280
【Theatre】I will die in my home│21–23.04.2023
Local playwright Chan Kwan Yee and director Yan Pat To collaborate for the first time to chronicle the century-old ghosts that linger within Wan Chai. Set at Wan Chai, the narrative theatre traversing time and space sets forth a story a woman who chose to stay and a tale of bygone years that relates to the city’s cultural changes. The story begins with a home bought by a Hong Kong grandmother. Built in the last century and once the home of glitz, with guests coming and going, it is now the place where the grandmother prophesies to her daughter-in-law about her granddaughter’s eventual passing. I will die in my home explores the idea that people, just like homes, will be forgotten eventually… just like the unrecorded last words of abandoned souls.
Date & Time: 21 April 2023, 8pm; 22–23 April 2023, 3pm and 8pm
Venue: F Hall Studio, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$280
【Site-specific Theatre】The Sublime Progressions│28–30.04.2023; 01, 03–06.05.2023
As humans, we share a special bond with land on our planet Earth. As we survive and expand our footprint on land by establishing cities, we also heed the urge to wander and choose to roam and migrate. Following The Inner Études produced by artist group Vividly in Tai Kwun in 2021 – an immersive theatre inspired by the Victoria Prison and the geological history of Hong Kong’s granite rocks that received four nominations at the HK Theatre Libre Awards and became a Design Mark recipient of Taiwan's Golden Pin Design Award – The Sublime Progressions this year explores themes of migration and diaspora by species and tribes, taking audiences on a journey through time and space in Tai Kwun. Through multi-dimensional soundscapes, lighting, projections, scenery, and performances in various locations, the site-specific theatre offers audiences the chance to rediscover their connection to the land and revelations of life, overcoming challenges and venturing into the unknown.
Date & Time: 28–30 April 2023, 7pm and 9pm; 01, 03–06 May 2023, 7pm and 9pm
Venue: Site-wide, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$280
【Online Podcast】Last Ride, Fresh Eyes │ 04–05.2023
Created and produced by the Drama School of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Last Ride, Fresh Eyes first premiered in 2022 as an immersive online performance in Tai Kwun “Onstage Online”. This year, the team presents a five-episode podcast adaptation of Last Ride, Fresh Eyes that transports listeners on a recreated voyage, witnessing how the lives of four Hongkongers become intertwined during a hitchhike ride from Central to East Kowloon. Recorded with ASMR technology alongside rearranged original songs, echoes and whispers of our city have been reimagined in an original audio journey, where audiences can experience together how Hongkongers overcome their struggles with perseverance in the face of difficulties. We don’t know what’s going to happen to our city tomorrow, but at least we still have today.
Date & Time: April - May 2023 (Exact schedule to be announced)
Venue: Online
Ticket: Free
Please visit Tai Kwun website for more details.