Adapted and directed by Jessica Ng and Page Richards
Mood, story and ongoing mystery of coming of age in Hong Kong… On these Hong Kong islands, often considered “tight for time and tight for space”— as one of our characters bluntly puts it— how to negotiate the high degrees of pressure and this maze of expectations?
We can “land” in our adolescence, wondering where to go or how to achieve, sometimes unrecognisable to ourselves. Do we stay at home, or study overseas, to achieve “prestige”? How do we maximise ourselves, as Mabel asks herself and others, while exploring this “tight, tight” city of space and time? Or, maybe, the dream is already among us, and we need only to find each other, as we are. Join us on stage for a splash at this weird pool party, moody and beautiful, hosted by K and friends.
Directors’ Notes
This show was born more than a year ago. A young writer asked us about the “American Dream” and, then, wondered, what was her “Hong Kong Dream”? On this city-island, often “tight for time and tight for space,” as one of our characters puts it, how to negotiate the maze of expectations, coming of age? Even if we grow up at home, we often “land” in adolescence wondering where we go, unrecognizable to ourselves. Do we stay at home, or study overseas, for greater “prestige”? How do we maximize ourselves, as Mabel asks, and our achievements, while exploring this city and our histories? Or, maybe, the dream is already among us, and we need only to find each other, as we are.
As Directors, we looked to the clichés of a city, local and overseas, that can get in the way of seeing any city in all its complexities. Just below the shimmying reflections, we see young K land in his adolescence, looking back. His high school friend, Mabel, rushes forward, feeling at first her future is overseas. Louis is Louis, a dedicated friend who yet takes himself and the others by surprise. The Mother offers concerns, and insights. DOB finds a thousand ways to make both growing up and landing on this “tight, tight” island, somehow feel already beautiful.
Story and dance and music come together in Hong Kong, and on this Hong Kong stage. We worked with our stunning cast on a new stage of development in this extraordinary and complex island. Together we reveled in the small and weird and wonderful accuracies of feeling that coming of age in Hong Kong, in particular, can take up and make its own. As Directors, we remain in awe of these multitalented actors, this fluid story, and the incredible production team who made it all possible. They built us a pool! We had so much fun and joy working together. We learned a lot. And we keep repeating all the lines in “real” life too, long after this pool party has ended.
Production Notes
Much research and many dreams went into pre-production, exploring Hong Kong life stories, histories, cultures, and kinship. And our interconnections extended to collaborating at the outset with colleagues Otto Heim, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Tom McCrory, and other guest artists, joining together for an international symposium on contemporary island societies, taking place at HKU in the first week of December. Our life writing students and Black Box research interns also joined on pre-production. They worked long and hard on detail, precision, holding close the spirit of the city. Not long after, we sent out a call across Hong Kong to collect histories and life stories to join with what we were discovering.
The work of the talented writer, Kuffy Ko, took up all our dreaming and research, as if on call. He offers a story of young adults, calling to one another. His story took us by surprise, and felt strangely familiar, joining the two in what only good writing can do. Two other gifted writers joined in the fabric and language of the story: Jocelyn Li, a poet, who is working on a memoir and biography in poems, and Bonnie Kwong, a writer, who like Mabel, has left to study at Emerson and has recently come back to Hong Kong. All the stories that we received and read moved us. We could make many more productions and tell many more life stories of the city, with more time and more space in the day. We very much look forward to doing just that. Meanwhile, you can also enjoy excerpts from two life stories, recently crafted, in the Life Writing section of this programme. Their stories, and many others, will be featured soon on the Life Writing Centre
website.
So, we come back, all of us, to Hong Kong. We come back to these stories, this unique island-city, the writing, actors and production teams who let us join together and see what happens, coming of age, when change is in the air, and a party is starting. Everyone is feeling tight for time and space, and friends and families are there to help us navigate home.