Performing the Globalized City: Contemporary Hong Kong Theatre and Global Connectivity

This paper looks at how Hong Kong theatre is expressing the city's relationship to globalization and its own position within a changing international framework. The performances feature the city responding to challenges of globalization and nationalism by resorting to various means of global connectivity. The impact of globalization on presenting the ultralocal, the national, and the global on stage will be examined. These are responses to internal factors such as Hong Kong theatre history and conventions, as well as reactions to external factors such as the resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong by the People's Republic of China in 1997. Hong Kong theatre dexterously negotiates the conflicting claims of localism, nationalism, and globalism to create a unique Hong Kong identity as a capitalistic Special Administrative Region within the communist People's Republic of China. Vignettes of the Chinese diaspora can also be found, with people converging in and diverging from Hong Kong, trying to respond to calls for modernity and globalism without loosing Chinese identity.