Fables and Fantasy Infuse 40th Hong Kong Arts Festival

Fables, fantasy and spirituality inspire many of the performances in the 40th annual Hong Kong Arts Festival, which runs through March 8. This year’s festival features over 160 productions, staged at 17 venues.

For  “Of Mountains and Seas,” a play by the Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian that draws heavily on ancient myths in a Chinese classical text, the Chinese director Lin Zhaohua infuses elements of Nuo opera, which is rooted in primitive religion. Mythology also takes center stage in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo performing the fairy tale comedy.

Another show involves the work of Osamu Tezuka, often called “the god of manga,” who composed fantastical tales in comic form. His stories come to life in “TeZukA,’’ a multimedia show by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, a Belgian choreographer. “TeZukA’’ uses dancers’ movements as one would use a calligraphy brush in this video homage to the pioneering Japanese artist.

“Faith Healer,” by the Irish playwright Brian Friel, takes a deeper look at the nature of art and belief through the monologues of a traveling faith healer, Francis Hardy; his wife, Grace, and his manager, Teddy. Mr. Friel has described the play as “a metaphor for art, the craft of writing, and the great confusion we all have about it, those of us who are involved in it.”

The austere spirituality of the desert infuses the music of Tinariwen, whose members are Tuareg nomads from the Sahara. Tinariwen mixes African, Arabic and Western styles to produce haunting, rhythmic music whose lyrics recall the hardships of life in the desert and of political struggles.

And fantasy and fashion come together in “The World of WearableArt,” a New Zealand production that is making its international debut in Hong Kong. Each year, “The World of WearableArt” showcases more than 150 costumes by New Zealand designers in a two-hour theatrical extravaganza. The 70-minute event at the Hong Kong festival displays the best creations from past shows.

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sources: nytimes.com

In Berlin, a Festival Focuses on the Contemporary Arts

This year is the 25th anniversary of Berlin’s alternative media arts festival, Transmediale. This five-day event, which starts on Tuesday at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt contemporary arts center, has a rich international program of artworks, installations, video screenings, workshops, performances and an interdisciplinary symposiums, all organized by various guest curators.

The Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts (CTM) will run concurrently in different venues around Berlin, and in collaboration with various Transmediale events. For festivalgoers interested in exploring audio and visual mediums outside of a gallery or screening room, check out the performance program Ghosts in the Machine, curated by Sandra Naumann. 

One of the highlights is the performance on Wednesday by the Joshua Light Show, the visual artists who appeared alongside the likes of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and The Doors. The founder,  Joshua White, will draw on a cache of slide projections, archival footage, an assortment of light reflective objects and other things to create a performance combining both analog and contemporary digital elements. The group, appearing for the first time in Europe since the 1960s, will feature the band Supersilent and the guitarist Stian Westerhus.

Also, to mark the festival’s quarter-century anniversary, the program will be peppered with the history and evolution of media and art culture over the years in Germany’s capital, and all of the eight video programs will begin with a notable work from the Transmediale archive.

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sources : http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com