1998 Hong Kong Fringe Festival (review)

Hung Le in Now and Zen, performed as part of the 1998 Hong Kong Fringe Festival. Photo uncredited.

Risako Ataka plays the title character in the Performance Exchange of Great Britain and Japan’s production of Clytemnestra, performed as part of the 1998 Hong Kong Fringe Festival. Photo: Yoshie Koibuchi.

The 1 July 1997 return of Hong Kong to Chinese control was met with much handwringing and discussion of what might be the implications for freedom of speech in the former British colony. Outgoing Hong Kong Governor Christopher Patten’s last-minute decision to impose a democratically elected governing board, after over one hundred years of autocratic British colonial rule, so annoyed the Chinese that mainland authorities followed through on a promise to abolish the governing board upon the hand-over. The promise of new elections administered under Chinese authority did little to set aside fears that mainland rule in Hong Kong might bring about the suppression of many of the freedoms to which Hong Kong people had long been accustomed. Accordingly, the 1998 Hong Kong Fringe Festival, the first post-hand-over alternative arts festival, appears a logical venue to examine what, if any, censorship might be detected. Traditionally, the Fringe provides a modest alternative to the extravagant official Hong Kong Festival of the Arts, which this year brought in some thirty-three acts including performances by the Los Angeles Opera (Salome), The Royal National Theatre of Great Britain (Othello), Spain’s Campania Nacional de Danza, Robert Wilson’s The Black Rider, along with major productions from across Asia, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.

Hong Kong’s Fringe Club, located near the trendy Lan Kwai Fong night club district on HK Island, has long been a favorite of the more self-consciously cultured segment of the large expatriate British pub community. For some sixteen years now, the club has offered its annual Fringe Festival, featuring art exhibitions and performances by small companies with simple technical demands. The performance venues include numerous theatres and community centers scattered across the territory ranging as far north as Sha Tin, but the vast majority of the performances take place in the Pub’s two small performance spaces, the Fringe Studio and La Cremeria Theatre. The 1998 Fringe Festival was slightly smaller than the previous year’s event, offering some forty-five different acts to the 1997 edition’s sixty-plus performance events. This year, a significant decline in the number of performances in English coincided with an increase in the number of events offered in Cantonese.

The organizers maintain an open access policy, providing spaces for all who wish to perform. They ask only that the material be engaging for their audiences. With this in mind, performance festivals around the world are targeted for acts which might be lured to the Hong Kong Fringe. 1998 saw some twenty events by groups from outside of Hong Kong. International acts view the Fringe as a potential opening to a new Asian market for their work, but locals often use the Fringe as a place to try out new material. The 1998 Festival, therefore, saw performances which ranged from a minimally attended Postcards From Elsie Elliot, a local dance tribute to Hong Kong’s “Mother of Democracy,” to an amusing reworking of a David Mamet piece entitled Sexual Perplexity in Hong Kong, to a UK production of Strindberg’s Miss Julie by the Gerry Boon Rough Magic Theatre Company. On the whole, some forty other pieces offered provided a rich mix of theatre, dance, mime, stand-up comedy, and music.

Notable among these was a Mike Maran (UK) production of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, a raucous treatment of the fascinating and eccentric life of Richard Feynman, the inventor of quantum-electrodynamics, which played to sold-out houses (perhaps an indication of the quirkiness of the HK audience). The Performance Exchange (UK/Japan) offered three challenging works: Clytemnestra, a terse movement theatre piece relating the events...