Performance venues are not passive, empty vessels to be filled with an artist’s lofty vision. How we experience a show is necessarily shaped by the space we experience it in. Whether sitting cross-legged at an intimate fringe theatre recital, or waving our arms around while squinting at an LED screen from the back of a stadium pop concert, context is king.
Leaning into this reality is Tai Kwun’s Spotlight festival, a series of site-specific, interdisciplinary works commissioned to play out amid the heritage building’s unique spaces. It’s a breath of fresh air, arriving off the back of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, which necessarily jets in blockbuster names to perform in imperfect and unfamiliar venues, minimising the milieu to chance. Spotlight instead invites the venue into a three-way conversation with the performers and the audience, ultimately prompting us to dwell on our vantage as a subjective participant in the performative process.
“Tai Kwun’s uniqueness lies not only in its heritage but also in how its various spaces inspire new creative thinking,” says its head of performing arts Linda Yip, underscoring the redeveloped arts complex’s former life as a police station, court house and prison.
Fire Drill Scenario by Korean performance artist Geumhyung Jeong
Global outlook
To underscore this fact, the opening show, entitled Fire Drill Scenario (March 26–29), is just that: Korean performance artist Geumhyung Jeong walks the audience through purpose-built venue JC Cube’s floor plan, outlining evacuation procedures and fire-fighting equipment (in English with Cantonese assistance). Think of it as a pre-festival ritual to consider your role as an audience member.
Spotlight’s sixth edition notably presents the festival’s first international commission, The Liar (April 23–26), a one-man play developed over two years by acclaimed Danish writer-director Tue Biering for Hong Kong actor Chan Tai-yin. Presented in both Cantonese and English versions, Chan is revealed as a classic unreliable narrator, as he unravels a life story clouded with doubt and embellishment prompting the audience to consider the role of perspective and the nature of fact.
Performers of Songs of Being
Words that matter
Similar ambiguities are played out in Songs of Being (April 8–16), a multi-venue, multidisciplinary performance that is likely to prove Spotlight’s local highlight. Shocked by the world’s pandemic-era unravelling, prolific composer (and Hong Kong New Music Ensemble director of programming) Daniel Lo found solace in William Blake’s romantic poetry volume Songs of Innocence and Experience, a UK high-school curriculum staple which contrasts pastoral poems of youthful idealism with darker vignettes of adult corruption and oppression.
Moved, he set about composing melodies for seven pairs of poems, latter collaborating with co-director Keith Lam to build them into an immersive, two-venue theatrical production. Accompanied by live electronics, Lo’s Songs will be simultaneously sung across two rooms — with a pure female chorus the voice of Innocence, while two lone males sing from Experience in the F Hall Studio. Yip invites the audience to “compare the acoustical properties of old and new architecture” while listening to the melodies performed by Hong Kong-based vocal ensemble NOĒM – who notable fulfilled a similar role performing between two rooms simultaneously at Ivanhoe Chun-ho Lam recent Song From FAR Away || FAR Away From Song.
Speaking of Hong Kong theatre, Spotlight also presents three local in-development scripts at a site-hopping recital series entitled Play Reading, which promises “to encourage early script development within the minimalist but evocative settings of Tai Kwun’s historic architecture.” How, you ask? Jason Lam’s Small Town Boys (April 2–4) will utilize film projections and bring a silent disco to the Laundry Steps, while Li Chi-tat channels Samuel Beckket with the site-wide Try Again, Fail Better (April 7–9). Finally, Alice Lee worked with veteran theatre-maker Tree Kwok to realise The Midnight Gallery (April 19–21), which sees two actors and one storyteller move between the Prison Yard’s glass structures.
Between Selves, The Waiting Room by Cola Ho
Movement with meaning
Interdisciplinary collaborations and unrestrained creation is sewn into Spotlight’s DNA, but if we’re to reductively packaging things for our fast-scrolling readers, there’s also a pair of compelling productions which draw readily on the traditions of dance. Between Selves (April 15–18) is a double header staged under the stars on the Laundry Steps. Drawing on her experience as an Asian abroad, Hong Kong-born, European-based Cola Ho’s The Waiting Room sees identities blur between two immigrant dancers in a liminal space. Meanwhile Guangzhou-based Liu Qingyu riffs on our online personas, dancing alongside her own digital avatar in Double Being.
Also from the Guangdong capital are choreographer ErGao (a Tai Kwun regular also known as He Qiwo) and multimedia artist Cao Fei, who collaborate for the first time with On the Up Grade (April 30–May 3), a mixed-medium work weaving whimsical folk dances and wax-print textiles across two distinct spaces to draw attention to often-marginalised communities.
Spotlight runs until 3 May 2026. Click here for more information.