• Stage Home
• What's On
• Features
• 
• 
• Bookmark this site

With a 98 percent attendance rate at this year’s Hong Kong Arts Festival, you would do well to plan ahead when tickets for the 2009 edition go on sale this fortnight. The complete programme will be announced on the festival’s website on Wednesday 15^th, and on the following day advance tickets will be sold. From what we’ve seen thus far, it’ll be a strong festival with some pioneering forces at work.

“We are going places with this festival, literally as well as metaphorically,” points out Tisa Ho, the festival’s Executive Director. Ho has brought a wave of new energy into the festival since she first took the helm in 2006, and the line-up for 2009 is particularly fresh, utilising new venues in the New Territories and commercial spaces.

The Latvian National Opera will stage their controversial performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's 20^th century opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk. Banned by Stalin in 1934 for its eroticism and violence, the opera is particularly theatrical. “It is not a stand and deliver style of opera,” says Ho. “The cast are thrown about, they are being mauled and singing at the same time.”

Another cutting edge show is The Wooster Group from New York, who will stage Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 work, The Emperor Jones. The show has received immense critical acclaim, with Kate Valk’s brilliant portrayal of a bulky African American man – complete with black face. “It’s a very interesting contemporary take on a classic work, and even more powerful because of that,” says Ho. “The original script stipulated a large burly guy, and in this production the role is being played by a petite artist. Instead of the usual South American military-type uniform, the costumes are Japanese influenced. The whole paradigm is turned on its head and on its head and on its head.”

Meanwhile, British theatre director Peter Hall stages Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (the inspiration of the film My Fair Lady) the story of Eliza Doolittle’s elocution lessons in a bid to become a lady. At the other end of the scale, the Vesturport Theatre of Iceland’s macabre Metamorphosis, Kafka’s tale about a man who wakes up one morning to find himself in the middle of an enormous insect, will be set to the soundtrack of Nick Cave’s music.

There is also a literary slant to the ballet performances: the English National Ballet performs Alice in Wonderland and the National Ballet of China translates The Peony Pavilion. Other highlights include the Chicago Orchestra under the baton of Bernard Haitink, and jazz giants Chick Corea and John McLaughlin. Book early and you’ll be laughing next February. Clare Morin

More info: www.hk.artsfestival.org