It’s ‘another world’: a part-theatre, part-art installation in Hong Kong offers visitors a multisensory experience to wander through
- ‘The Travellers and The Listeners’, a performance inspired by a poem and held in a theatre in West Kowloon, transports visitors to an ominous, desolate universe
- The multisensory presentation uses a haunting soundtrack, dreamlike visuals, technology and live musicians and actors to bring the 1912 poem to life
The moment you walk into “The Travellers and The Listeners”, the multimedia experience transports you to an ominous and desolate universe.
A performer moves through the space slowly, reaching out as if feeling for something we cannot see. He bangs on an invisible door. Those who left the chairs behind do not answer his call.
Over the course of an hour, the audience can walk through nine scenes that take them through a part-theatre, part-art installation that is inspired by the English writer Walter de la Mare’s 1912 The Listeners.
The 36-line poem describes a traveller standing at the door of an abandoned house filled with phantoms. They listen as he knocks on the door, and asks repeatedly if anybody is home. But they do not respond, leaving him perplexed and alone.
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“From the very beginning,” curator Bobo Lee says, “you have to prepare to go into another world.”
According to Lee, the venue is meant to resemble the “unseen” part of the poem, the phantom listeners on the other side of the door.
Last year, inspired by artist Josef Albers’ 1960s theories on the interaction of colours and how they affect emotions, Young worked with lighting designers Kinphen Leung and Kaki Lai, sound designers Gut Lam, Caesar Seto and Jaycee Kwok, space designer Tiffany Lau, and musicians Colleen Lee and Linus Fung.
This year, Lam and Lai continue the collaboration with Young, together with set and costumes designer Ayami Oki-Siekierczak, performer Woo Yat-hei, violist William Lane and Fung, on the clarinet, to create the ghostly atmosphere in “The Travellers and The Listeners”.
In particular, the team has experimented with the interaction between what you can see and what you can hear. Unusually for such a visually striking project, each element was built around the musical score that Young composed, which serves as a backbone for “The Travellers and The Listeners”.
The composition is brought to life by a clarinettist and violinist who occasionally enter the space, while a piano, wrapped in strips of silk fabric, plays on its own.
“Everything has a double layer. It’s like something from that world is playing in this reality,” Lee says.
However, some details – such as people wearing pigeon and horse masks – are confined to the videos. Those familiar with de la Mare’s poem will recall that a bird and a horse are the only living creatures in the poem aside from the traveller himself.
Instead, she sees the multimedia components as a way to create a holistic narrative and a distinct artistic language.
Each performance is about an hour long and is looped over three hours. Audience members can enter and exit the theatre any time. To enhance the experience, reading the short poem beforehand is highly recommended.
“TechBox 2023: The Travellers and the Listeners” will run from July 21-23 from 7.30pm to 10.30pm at Freespace in West Kowloon Cultural District. Tickets cost HK$320 (US$41) each.
