Play is the thing

Friday, August 31, 2018

Q: Onnie, you were an actress with Hong Kong Repertory Theatre for three years. When did you think of doing immersive theater?

OC: Six years ago I came back to Hong Kong from the UK, where I studied in Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Funnily enough, I was introduced to King Wong, who was in Hong Kong, through a British girl I knew in the UK. After we met, King and I went back to the UK, watched a lot of immersive theater there and decided to bring the form to Hong Kong. During my Hong Kong Repertory Theatre days, I felt the proscenium theater model created a disconnect with the audience. Immersive theater seemed like a more effective way of connecting with the audience. Since Hong Kong people love pop culture, we thought of doing immersive theater pop-culture style. We teamed up with TV anchor Brian Chen.

Q: Banana Effect is an unusual name for a theater company.

How did that come about?

OC: Andy Warhol’s words “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” came to mind, since our idea was to put the audience at the center of our shows, (even if only for a short time). That’s how we thought of the banana, since we wanted to have the audience as the main focus, like the banana in Warhol’s artwork. (Warhol’s cover design for the debut album of US rock band The Velvet Underground was the image of an overripe banana, which subsequently became an icon of pop art).

KW: Also, banana is a healthy food. We want our shows to be energetic and we would like some of that energy to be transferred to the young people who are our target audience.

Q: And where does game-playing fit into your scheme of things? OC: King, Brian and I, all three of us like playing games. In 2013 I was one of the early developers of FreeingHK!, a company where I created online game rooms which could be adapted to be played as reality games in the physical space. At Banana Effect we have an immersive theater game lab where we do workshops, play board games, discuss video games…

KW: Games are a way of engaging the audience in the shows we create. The format of the show is that the audience is required to participate in a game. The game is neither purely physical nor super-intellectual like playing chess.

OC: For instance, our first production, The Game of Life, is designed like a TV game show. The audience is sorted into groups competing against one another, as they deal with a different challenge at each stage of the competition.

Q: Let’s hear about one of your more recent performances — KW: We put on Alice in Stuckyland in the Central Harbourfront Event Space as well as in Nursery Park, West Kowloon Cultural District. The world we created was fictional (a take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland). It was manic, crazy and chaotic in some ways.

The idea was to let the audience have a taste of different possible expressions of immersive theater. They got some physical exercise by walking through a maze we created. Instructions were radioed to them through earphones. It was as if the Cheshire Cat from Alice was playing a game of hide-and-seek with them. Interestingly, when participants walked out of the gates of the compound, the radio caught signals from passing taxis. The two audio tracks merged and created a different experience we had not planned for. We thought it made the experience more real.

Q:

book. What was your spin on it?

OC: We turned Alice into a male character, to provoke curiosity. And each time we put on that show we built in a theme relevant to Hong Kong at the time. For example, the first time round, the three rabbits trying to find their paths reflected the anxiety of Hong Kong youth about their future. For another show where our audience comprised about 100 teenagers, we raised the issue of suicides by secondary school students who are unhappy with their lives.

We make these shows appear a bit edgy or weird because we want them to convey the sense that there is a different layer of things underneath what meets the eye.

is a very familiar, classic children’s

Q: Your forthcoming show, of the four great classical Chinese novels by Wu Cheng’en). What made you choose it?

OC: We like to use Chinese literary heritage as the material for our

is based on one c.1592

Q: Is it very hi-tech?

OC: Not terribly hi-tech, but there will be some use of smartphone technology. We did a bit of investigation trying to gauge how people would like the future to look. Surprisingly, the feedback reveals that they may not be so excited about hi-tech and cyber-style shows. My teammates said they might like to see a future where nature plays a bigger role. So we are kind of creating our own future world.

Q: Does the audience get to wear masks like in some of your earlier

productions?

OC: We realized wearing a mask throughout the show may not be very comfortable. Still, we need the audience to believe they are a character in an immersive theater show. So we’ll give the audience some kind of a thing to wear — a device through which they can participate in the games.

KW: The reason we gave the audience masks to wear in The Game of Life was because it was in the format of reality TV. Hong Kong audiences are very reserved. So we thought wearing a mask might help hide the identity of the participants and push them toward playing the games and engaging with the show.

In the end, there were 10 winners from among 70 people and they were invited to take their masks off. In a way, this was a reflection of Hong Kong society where we only acknowledge the winners while the rest don’t seem to matter.

OC: I feel wearing a mask gets in the way of the audience fully engaging in the experience. My curatorial statement reads: “You might find yourself feeling uncomfortable or lost in an uncontrollable design cluster. Try not to escape the true feelings that will act through your body, because they will lead you to the right answers to my question.” So I would like the audience to engage in the show without having to mask their identities.

Q: I suppose feeling uncomfortable is part of the point of immersive theater. Both actors and audience place themselves within touching distance of each other and neither knows what the other will do next.

KW: Well, if you gave total freedom to the audience to do as they please, things might get totally out of control and that could be the end of your show. There has to be an element of control on their movements, although it might not be so apparent. We do have back-up plans to deal with a possible crisis. At the same time the impression we like to give the audience is that they are free to explore and they are in safe hands.