2022TAF:In Search of the Miraculous

Based on her own family relations with Taiwan, Hong Kong artist Vee Leong, whose father passed away when she was young, works with lay actors and situates In Search of the Miraculous as an action-research performance.

She recruits men in Taipei to ‘become’ her own fathers - in the plural form. With these impossible fathers, she embarks on a sea adventure: an open rehearsal of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a role-play game of real vs make-belief, set against the zeitgeist of the pandemic and Hong Kong’s political turn. The father figures are mere projections - unlikely but recognizable.

Charting destinies that haunt Hong Kong and Taiwan, the work is charged with bittersweet humour and self-irony, for many failures - of breaking through; of reclaiming freedom and justice; of reconciling with senseless repetition of history - are to be discreetly studied and calibrated for possible futures.

Vee Leong, Hong Kong
Vee is writer-director in text-based and intermedia art making since 2010. Awarded Best Director in Hong Kong Theatre Libre (2015) for Martin Crimp’s  The City, she is dedicated to the research and practice of contemporary form and politics of text-based theatre making, developing an interest also in sound-based and durational performances, investigating socially charged topics and interdisciplinary dramaturgy in an independent spirit and from a feminist perspective. With a wealth of work including the critically-acclaimed  Who Killed The Elephant  (2012, 2021), and directorial titles of European new writing by Sarah Kane, Caryl Churchill, Martin Crimp and Kevin Rittberger, she has appeared in Hong Kong Arts Festival, New Vision Arts Festival, Taipei Arts Festival and Manchester International Festival in recent years. An active member in cross-cultural collaboration, she works closely with such artists as orleanlaiproject, Performosa Theatre, Against Again Troupe, Betty Chen Yichun as well as On & On Theatre Workshop where she was Resident Director from 2013 to 2018. She teaches Dramaturgy at Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
 

Against-Again Troupe

Against-Again Troupe was founded in 2002 in Taiwan by a group of theatre practitioners coming from diverse artistic backgrounds. Our productions range from theatre, musical performances, to exhibitions and small-scale performance festivals. Major works lie in the field of site-specific theatre, music theatre and performance poetry, implementing objects, sound, and multimedia to create performance pieces infused with collage, repetition, alienation, and non-narrative text. A large portion of our work is socially conscious and issue-related. Through art we attempt to examine the human condition in our age of globalization, in regards to class, gender, identity and survival.

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