It is worth periodically remembering—as the tsunami of news of China’s momentous economic and political developments rushes past—that China has not always been “Chinese” in the quite the way it is, or can be presented to be, today.
Not all operas or performances are about the singers. The star of the Welsh National Opera’s performance of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Hong Kong Arts Festival was its orchestra and conductor Lothar Koenigs who did Claude Debussy’s seamless score proud.
The Script Road—otherwise known as the Macau Literary Festival—has long if not always included performances as well as traditional book talks. One of these, performed on 14 March 2018, is the multimedia theatrical “My Macau”, by Portuguese visual artist António-Pedro, which combines live theatre (or at least monologue) with video and live music (mostly eclectic…
The misdirection starts with the novel’s cover. Hasan Ali Toptas’s Shadowless is, in spite of its title, full of shadows.
There is an old saw about advertising that only half of it works, but one never knows which half. And one suspects that despite all the data gathered and statistics generated, the online counterpart remains more art than science. Digital marketing involves navigating, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, a number of known unknowns: things…
Shukshin’s Stories is a dramatization of eight short stories by Soviet-era writer Vasily Shukshin (1929-74). If you know little or nothing about him or Moscow’s Theatre of Nations which presented it, you would not—at least among English-speakers—be alone and would have, at least until last night, had me as company. Ignorance may not be bliss,…
Ballet, which communicates visually and eschews words, is perhaps the antithesis of literature which does entirely the opposite. So how does one transform an eight-hundred page novel with a dozen important characters and several major plot lines into a two-hour staging using only movement and music? You might well ask.
Sebastian Heilmann brings what is, for English-speaking readers, a somewhat rare European—or perhaps more precisely, German—perspective to the question of “China’s rise”, a term now almost de rigueur.
Canada’s answer to—whom? Jason Bourne?—is a lesbian forensic accountant of Chinese extraction by the name of Ava Lee. But in The Imam of Tawi-Tawi, her tenth outing, Ava isn’t this time tracking down missing millions but has instead been sucked into the global “War on Terror”.
It’s not often, if ever, that Hong Kong holds two opera world premieres in a single week; 2018 is off to a good start.
Not only is The Silver Age: Origins and Trade of Chinese Export Silver a useful companion to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum exhibition of the same name, the catalog has enough material, extending well beyond the exhibition, to be a valuable volume in its own right.
Hong Kong can be a curious place. Ghost Love is a new Putonghua-language chamber opera, conceived and written locally, receiving what is—insofar as I can tell—its world premier this weekend, and yet, despite a number of attractive posters placed around town, there is hardly any mention of this in the press or online.
Although China’s centuries-long demand for silver was one of the catalysts for the birth of globalization, silver products were also an important Chinese export. So-called “Chinese export silver” is the subject of a current exhibition at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum.
If George Psalmanazar sounds like a made-up name, that’s because it was. Psalmanazar, whose real name seems lost to history, was a turn of 18th-century Frenchman who claimed, with no small success, to be first native of “Formosa” (ahem) to visit Europe.
This special exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of History makes considerable use of audiovisuals, especially video, which have the dual advantage of not requiring insurance and holding the interest better than, say, incomplete pots which, however interesting, can also be somewhat dry.