Room 2048 conjures a world of sound and light
When you are immersed in the distinctive sensory worlds that the multimedia mavericks at Hong Kong Exile create, it’s sometimes fun to pull yourself out, for just a moment, and imagine the guy working the digital controls.
After all, it is collective member Remy Siu, the composer turned lighting-and-projection wizard, who is conjuring these environments. In the new work Room 2048, he’ll be triggering live sound and projected light, in a performance unseen by the audience but a performance nonetheless.
“Thinking about sound and design and light: that’s my favourite part,” he admits to the Straight over the phone, enjoying a quick coffee in the Crosstown ’hood near his historic Gold Saucer Studios. “It’s a trajectory I’ve been on for a while. I wrote composition, orchestral music, then did programming, then moved from that to lighting. So I’m starting to think of all these pieces as a creative apparatus for our shows.”
He’s part of an ensemble that defies easy categorization. Made up of theatre artist Milton Lim, dance artist Natalie Gan (who’s choreographing Room 2048), and Siu himself, the trio came together out of the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts and named itself for the unique diasporic, dissociative mood that fuels its work. The three take turns leading projects, but more and more, Siu reveals, their art forms are melting into one another so “that we can only think of them as multimedia works”.
Room 2048 is a follow-up to NINEEIGHT, where Siu live-triggered the percussion-and-soundeffects score and projections and Gan’s performers drew from the silly Cantonese slapstick comedies called mo lei tau. The title pointed to the year after the political handover of Hong Kong to China—a period around when these films were also made.
Now the ensemble moves forward in time. When the British handed Hong Kong back to Mainland China on July 1, 1997, the agreement set out a 50-year period of “One Country, Two Systems”—a situation whose rights infringements have already drawn unrest. And 2048 will mark the year after this period of preservation.
Over the two-year process of creating Room 2048, Siu says, his group has watched the situation in Hong Kong deteriorate—“especially after the most recent quote-unquote election, or the selection, of the CEO,” he says, referring to the small, appointed election committee that chose pro-beijing candidate Carrie Lam on March 26. “We’ve just watched things get worse and worse in Hong Kong. Through the development of this piece all sorts of things have happened and it really doesn’t seem like it is getting any better.
“But one of the big identifiers of this work is this is being made in Vancouver,” he adds. “We’re diaspora, having grown up and been in Vancouver. And we’re trying to understand our role as diaspora at a distance.”
Like NINEEIGHT, though, Room 2048’s political concerns are abstracted to an experiential, emotional level. Again, the work draws from film— this time from the stylish cinema of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai and his mood of nostalgic yearning. His influences are evident in many stylistic choices in the dance-theatre piece performed by Michelle Lui, Milton Lim, and Alex Tam—and not just with the atmospheric fog that appears now and then.
“I was just trying to create these worlds of light,” says Siu, who, for the first time, is using all-digital projected light and a sampled soundtrack of bombastic pop music. “And some of the colour was definitely drawn from the palette Wong Kar-wai would use.”
He says the piece also plays with cinematic devices, re-creating them through design and choreography— cutting back and forth in time like a film montage, or mimicking a camera’s slow pan.
These techniques also play with the work’s larger theme: time, and there is a large breadth of time to consider when you are imagining three decades into the future. “It’s more about how to play with the passage of time, and how that passage of time can stand in for a really long passage of time—as in generational,” he says.
Just what you ought to conclude from their heady mix of sound, light, and movement about that distant future across the Pacific is left open by the troupe.
“We didn’t prescribe how the audience will see these things,” Siu says. “Our goal at this point is to make something interesting for people to look at, and the process.
“We’ve always really worried about being didactic about it. But we do want it to be textural. There’s a nice ambiguity about this work—maybe even compared to our other work. It’s much more abstracted here. It’s really felt versus explaining anything at all.”
Room 2048 is at the Firehall Arts Centre from Tuesday to next Saturday (April 11 to 15).