Sam Tung Uk Museum Feb 15-18

After all the pre-performance fieldwork, the four young dancer-choreographers of 3D Museum in Motion have finally found the right door into the unfamiliar Hakka culture. “What has made the strongest impression on me isn’t where or how [Hakka people] live – but their food culture,” says Malvina Tam. “We always talk about braised pork belly with mui choy.” Right away, the two other girls, Lim Wei Wei and Ivy Tsui, start to recount their home visit to Hugh Cho’s Hakka parents where they got hands-on experience cooking the traditional Hakka dish – and the team is actually considering presenting the dish at their performance.

As part of LCSD’s LIVE! at Museums series, Unlock Dancing Plaza’s new production will take place in Sam Tung Uk Museum, a restored 200-year-old walled village in Tsuen Wan once inhabited by a Hakka family. Tsui, who lives in Tsuen Wan and treated the museum as her childhood playground, knows the monument’s floor map by heart but has paid little attention to its history. “I saw many maze-like walls and I pondered over why people in the past would build such a structure for their family to live in,” she says. “What are the functions? Why aren’t there [large] windows on the outside?” Those walls, Tsui recently found out, used to be a defence measure against pirates. The fact has triggered her to reflect on the ‘walls’ in virtual reality that hinder face-to-face contact nowadays and all that emotional venting on Facebook walls.

Lim, a native Malay having lived in Hong Kong for five years, feels just as alienated from Hakka culture. Yet, new friends in Hong Kong wouldn’t consider her a foreigner and even her own family find her very ‘Hong Kong’. “Now I can hardly make out which identity I’m living by in this space,” says Lim, whose solo will be themed on her identity. “You can see that I keep some traditional Malay dancing hand gestures but they are mixed with my everyday [body] language.”

As a Hakka descendant, Cho relates the spirit of his culture to Brazilian martial art dance moves. His ‘solo’ will be accompanied by a Capoeira dancer and a Hakka folk song singer. “I want to connect it with Hong Kong and people nowadays more than presenting Hakka people in the past,” he explains.

With no fixed seating or performing areas, 3D Museum in Motion requires a lot of audience participation and, for some parts, the audience will be given 3D glasses. Tam, who plays a Hakka old lady and a girl of her age alternately in her dance, adds: “We won’t set things out or demand: you must watch this!” Still, she urges everyone to get a ticket to the show. “Otherwise, Sam Tung Uk would exist independently and have nothing to do with us.”

Winnie Chau

Tickets: 2734 9009; www.urbtix.hk.