Local artists take a leap with Hong Kong’s first International Women's Theatre Festival. By Josefina Chaplain.

Hong Kong’s women playwrights, directors and actresses have ganged up to kick off their first festival. Local groups, performing everything from stand-up
comedy to interpretative dance, are joined by a handful of critically acclaimed international ensembles. Among them are the avant-garde Taiwanese Critical Point Theatre, and groundbreaking women's theater troupe Split Britches from New York, who will also hold a seminar and workshop session.While the festival, Girl Play, was officially launched last week at the Arts Festival, the bulk of the productions will be staged between now and the end of the month.

Ribble Chung, one of the festival's curators, explains, "We don't have a lot of good female creative artists around here. We have a lot of good actresses and stage managers, but we don't have a lot of directors and playwrights, so we were thinking that maybe we should do something to encourage women to do more of their own work." This was easier said than done according to Yau Ching, who is curating Girl Play with Chung. "It was at least six or eight months before we had any positive response from anybody about the idea," she says.

Although all the performances deal with women and women's experiences, there are as many different approaches as there are participants. Lunar Culture is a mostly local group consisting of over 20 women. They're performing a multi-media show called Beautiful Project on March 30-31. The group's artistic director, Wong Yuen-ling, has been involved in women's theater since the late 1980s. She used meditation as a starting point for this performance because of its peacefulness and, also because it is concerned with the here and now. Other components involve dance, music, song, video art and some dialogue.

The performance is meant to contribute beauty to society. "This is it, this is our world and our society, like it or not," says Wong. "If I keep complaining that this is not good and that is not right, that creates a lot of negative energy. Of course we talk about gender and equality, but ultimately we want peace, ultimately we would like to see people loving each other, not because we are women or we are men."

Local playwright Ann Ho decided to give stand-up comedy a go. She claims, "Women's humor is under-represented. We can have all kinds of fun when we are with other women but when we are with men we tend to get the good-girl syndrome." Ho has called her one-woman show Miss No Fear (performed in Cantonese on March 23-25). She explores women's fears in Hong Kong and in the world, fears about everything from education, to marriage, to living in this bustling city. She explains, "As a woman I don't mind being very personal. I try to understand the social meaning in my own experiences."

Yau agrees that women performers and playwrights here tend to speak from a
deliberately feminine viewpoint. "In Hong Kong, women's voices have not really been encouraged in the mainstream, so I think a lot of the women performers want to speak as women, because they are not allowed to do so in other contexts."

Split Britches, who has created women's theater in New York since the 1970s, has been able to move beyond the purely personal to integrate larger historical and cultural issues. In their eclectic three-woman show, Salad of the Bad Café (March 16-17), issues of gender and sexual identity are tossed with orientalist attitudes between the West and Asia. Ultimately, it's a story about a love triangle between shifting characters that are both feminine and masculine, where love is unrequited, either given or taken, but never both. "The group uses a lot of techniques from object theater, physical theater and experimental theater as well as a bit of cabaret," says Yau. "It's typical of cutting-edge New York theater these days. It's a lot of fun and they also play with the audience's expectations in many ways."

The Taiwanese group Critical Point Theatre will be showing a double number (March 16-18) called Marly Marlene and Jony Jonathan. Both plays use the same skeleton but one is performed and directed by women and the other by men. "They are two very different angles," says Chung, "very different ways of seeing things."

The curators have not limited the theater groups to specific women's issues. According to Yau, they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted. Most of them, however, chose to speak from a woman's perspective; about the relationship between mother and daughter; women's bodies; the concepts of femininity and beauty; or about gender roles. At the same time these are all very individual voices. "I'm very happy about the diversity in this festival," says Yau. "They all speak from a woman's position and they are not ashamed to say so."

Girl Play shows at the Arts Centre (2 Harbour Rd., Wanchai) from March 9-31. Tickets available from all URBTIX outlets. Performances can be in English or Cantonese. Call 2582-0273 or go to www.hkac.org.hk for more information.