Asian Performance Tradition and Contemporary Cultural Reality

ASIAN PERFORMANCE TRADITION AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL REALITY Daryl Chin The Conference on Asian Performing Arts (Hong Kong) he Urban Council of Hong Kong, the government funding agency in that municipality, has sponsored an annual Festival of Asian Arts since 1976; this year, 1994, marked the fifteenth such festival to be presented in Hong Kong. The purpose of the festival was to bring together international performance groups keeping alive Asian performance traditions. However, the idea evolved to include those performance groups showing the influence of Asian performance traditions; as examples, the recent festival brought David Hykes (an American currently living and working in France), The East-West Ensemble (based in Israel), and the percussion ensemble Synergy from Australia. This year, the Festival of Asian Arts was accompanied, for the first time, by a Conference on Asian Performing Arts, co-sponsored by the International Association of Theatre Critics (Hong Kong). When you're in Hong Kong, you realize that all such appellations are considered important. The publicity information on the conference read: "New Challenge:Form and ContentofContemporaryAsian Theatreis the theme of the Conference, and built around two main events in the Festival: the Yokohama Boat Theatre's performance of Oguri Hangan, Terute Hime and the Chengdu Sichuan Opera Theatre's performance of The Good Person ofSichuan.Theatre experts from Australia, Britain, China, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States will present their views on the development of contemporary Asian performing arts in an international context, and the two theatre companies will conduct two workshops." The festival took place from October 21 through November 12, with the conference taking place November 4 through 6. In addition, students from the University of Hong Kong and Baptist College participated in two forums on criticism, focusing on performances by the Chung Ying Theatre Company and Zuni Icosahedron. Arriving in Hong Kong, I had no idea what to expect from the conference, organized by Dr. Vicki Ooi, professor at the University of Hong Kong. The prospectus stressed the usual dichotomy of "East" and "West," formulations which gave me pause. "East" and "West" provided too sharp a distinction, reinforcing E 97 oppositional strategies. However, the organization of the conference proved to be very astute, as the progression of the papers developed from a broad focus of Asian traditions to a specific focus on Chinese traditions. Right now, there is an implosion of energy in Hong Kong: the pace of life has become incredibly hectic. The city seems to be in the grip of constant construction. There's nowhere to walk without scaffolding, as buildings are being renovated, torn down, rebuilt. New buildings are going up on a daily basis; in some cases, they seem to be built overnight. Change isn't isolated, it's on every block. Hong Kong prides itself on being a city of the future. The sites for the performances of the festival exemplify this current condition: the City Hall Theatres and the Hong Kong Cultural Centre are relatively new arts complexes, built within the last decade (in fact, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre was opened two years ago). I don't think I've ever been in a city which was in such a combustion of change. But there's very little chance of understanding the nature of the changes in Hong Kong, and how those changes are affecting the social and cultural life of the city. I'm not referring to something like "the mysterious East," rather that a five-day stay in a city for an academic conference does not provide an opportunity to see the city in any depth. I'll start off with an example. On November 2, a number of the participants in the conference, as well as students from the University of Hong Kong and Baptist College, attended a preview of Old Master Q,a musical by the Chung Ying Theatre Company. OldMasterQis based on a popular comic strip; it's a brash, pop musical, rather attenuated but highly energetic. When we got to the forum to discuss the musical, those of us not from Hong Kong could only talk about the piece in terms of its style. We could point to the prevalence of pop culture as a...