Chitralekha Basu

education system in Hong Kong and keep raising questions. “I left the theater with a feeling that this was a show that relates to our lives. So I would say HKAF Young Friends program helps facilitate a connection between students and society,” Ngan said.

Delightful side shows

Not all of HKAF’s outreach programs are geared towards recruiting and nurturing potential future audiences. They also believe in pampering the more mature variety of audiences, sometimes by giving them a little extra, a bit of a side show built around the main viewing experience. For example, the poet Liu Wai-tong, who is a literary advisor to the music-and-poetry presentation Hong Kong Odyssey which debuts at this year’s festival, led a tour from Kowloon City to North Point in December, by way of introducing poetry enthusiasts to the upcoming show which is a celebration of the city’s journey through history since 1840. “He read some old Hong Kong poems and interpreted them. The participants got a chance to write a few lines themselves which were then compiled together to make a single poem,” informs Vanessa Chan, program manager of HKAF.

A lot of these peripheral but noless-charming activities are nominally priced or even free of charge. In special cases the performers themselves have travelled across the city to meet their audience. Chan recalls Fanfare Ciocarlia, a gypsy brass band from Romania who performed at last year’s festival, making a trip to the Vine Church in Wan Chai to play to a group of refugees served by the church. “In the end the refugees started dancing.”

The high point of HKAF’s community outreach programs this year, however, are two free-to-access installation-cum-light-and-sound shows aimed at just about everybody, including very small children. The Super Pool, designed by Jen Lewin, features circular laser pads that create radiating ripples of light