A food court inspired this innovative show
Artistic inspiration comes in many forms, and sometimes when and where you least expect it. The creators of the innovative multimedia show No Foreigners, which plays this week at the Theatre Centre, chanced on its central conceit during their meal breaks.
As David Yee, artistic director of Toronto’s fu-GEN Theatre, explains it, the crystallizing moment happened during a residency at the Gateway Theatre in Richmond, B.C., in August 2016. He and the three core members of the Vancouver interdisciplinary company Hong Kong Exile (HKX) were developing a project about a public-signage controversy in Richmond, a fastgrowing city attracting many immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.
“Because we were in Richmond and hungry, we ended up in Chinese malls, in the food court,” Yee says. “As we spent time there we realized the signage debate was one piece of a larger puzzle that dealt with immigration.”
The controversy that was the basis of the project may sound familiar to GTA readers, as it echoes a debate in Markham in the mid-1990s around signage in the Pacific Mall and elsewhere that was exclusively in Chinese languages. Since 2014, there have been demands on Richmond’s city council to prevent monolingual signs, which was only recently addressed by a policy recommending — but not requiring — business owners to include English on signs.
Yee and his colleagues saw in these tensions “fear of the other and fear of being othered” amongst the majority culture.
“The discussion around the signage debate had to do with how we create cultural cohesion,” says Milton Lim, HKX’s co-founder. “The mall contained all of that for us.”
The focus of the project shifted to the Asian-Canadian shopping mall as a site where Chinese diasporas meet and mix, in all their cultural, linguistic and generational diversity. Yee, Lim and the other HKX members, Natalie Tin Yin Gan and Remy Siu, dove in by sending Yee on a reconnaissance mission that handed them their show’s title. They’d seen a luxury handbag store in a Richmond mall that had a “Members Only” sign on the door. When Yee rang the doorbell, the woman who answered “gives me the look up and down and says ‘No foreigners’ and closes the door in my face.”
“I kind of took a cinematic, shocked step backwards. That was a very strange experience and very mysterious,” Yee says. “I don’t know what she read, with me being mixed-race.” (Yee is half Scottish, half Chinese.)
“That one story is standoffish,” Lim says, “but there is a good part of Chinese malls that feels like home for me and the other creators . . . it’s a place in which there are lots of tensions for us as Chinese diaspora . . . It’s kind of home, but it’s also ‘Sorry, no foreigners.’ ”
Chinese malls are intricate, busy environments and Lim says attempts to represent them in a theatre space started to feel “insurmountable,” until Siu proposed a multi-camera setup in which images of little figurines, manipulated by live actors, are projected onto large screens. This allows the action to move between a number of loca- tions without having to navigate the expense and complexity of representing them in life-sized form. Two actors (Derek Chan and April Leung) operate the cameras, handle the figurines and provide all the voices.
Yee, a Governor General’s Awardwinning playwright, was tasked with creating the script, which he says was “a big challenge.” The central questions became “how we play with perspective in narrative. How do we use our technical capabilities to blow the doors off of what could be a classic immigration story?”
He found part of his answer in another of the show’s necessary conventions: supertitles, given that 50 per cent of the show is spoken in Cantonese. He realized that the projected titles “don’t have to be just language translation. They can help drive that shift of perspective.” At points, the voice in the projected text changes from first to second or third person, so that “we can tell various sides of the stories very quickly.”
The action moves through different locations including a bag store, gadget shops, Chinese medicine dispensaries and a food court, shifting linguistically from English to Cantonese.
The Globe and Mail’s Marsha Lederman, who reviewed the show in Vancouver, praised the ways in which its use of languages reflects “the linguistic juggling of the immigrant experience.” Another key aspect of the show is its soundtrack, which Lincoln Kaye of the Vancouver Observer describes as “a mix of electronica, Canto-pop and vapid shopping mall Muzak.”
An agenda for both companies is bringing in members of the Chinese diaspora who know these malls, but may not be regular theatregoers. “Welcoming the community to the work is something we try to do with everything we produce,” Yee affirms. No Foreigners plays at the Theatre Centre Feb. 21 to 25. Visit theatrecentre.org or call 416-538-0988. Karen Fricker is a Toronto Star theatre critic. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Carly Maga.
“There is a good part of Chinese malls that feels like home for me and the other creators . . . It’s kind of home, but it’s also ‘Sorry, no foreigners.’ ” MILTON LIM CO-FOUNDER OF HONG KONG EXILE