Hong Kong Ballet, orchestras are back to promoting the city through overseas tours
- Hong Kong Ballet and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta have already toured abroad this year. The Hong Kong Philharmonic and Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra will follow soon
- These ensembles increasingly play roles as cultural ambassadors to ‘tell a positive Hong Kong story’, as the government urged after the street protests of 2019
After three years cut off from international audiences, Hong Kong performing arts groups have been making up for lost time on pandemic-delayed overseas tours.
While going on the road is nothing new for Hong Kong artists, their appearances on the global stage have more of an ambassadorial function these days, with the city having gone through so much change while being physically isolated from the world.
Among the first to venture out was the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, which sent an eight-person ensemble to perform in Tokyo and Osaka in December 2022. The full orchestra has since been to Singapore and four cities in Japan, and will tour mainland China in November.
The Hong Kong Ballet took its full 80-member company to New York and North Carolina in January for performances of artistic director Septime Webre’s Romeo + Juliet – a sumptuous production which premiered in 2021 with an extravagant set based on 1960s Hong Kong.
In July, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta performed at the Festival International de Piano de la Roque d’Antheron in France, and the Marvao International Music Festival in Portugal.
Next to go is the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, which will perform in the Chinese cities of Nanjing and Shanghai in September on the first leg of an 18-city Asia and European tour.
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It is not just the big ensembles and companies that are touring. All summer, the Asian Youth Orchestra has been performing in Europe and Asia. And in July, the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong took its Australia-born founder Leanne Nicholls’ Wild (The Musical) to London’s Fuse International Festival.
What do these cultural exports say to outsiders about Hong Kong, a city whose reputation has taken a beating since the 2019 anti-government protests and China’s 2020 imposition of a national security law?
The government, whose economic and trade offices (ETOs) around the world pay for some of these tours, is keen to point out how such shows confirm the success of China’s “one country, two systems” formula for ruling Hong Kong and the city’s role as an “East-meets-West cultural hub” as laid out in Beijing’s 14th five-year plan in 2021 – even when the show in question is a riotous, family-friendly musical with a theme of nature conservation.
Speaking at the opening performance of Wild, the director general of the London ETO, Gilford Law, said the original musical showed off Hong Kong’s “distinctive East-meets-West vibrancy” and how, “benefiting from its unique strengths under ‘one country, two systems’, Hong Kong is a melting pot of Chinese and Western cultures with extensive international connections”.
Sometimes, politics sway the way foreign critics view Hong Kong productions. An American reviewing Hong Kong Ballet’s production of Romeo + Juliet in New York wrote: “Webre went for acrobatics and precision rather than passion. Perhaps, the Chinese Communist regime frowns upon openly sexual expression in dance.”
Heidi Lee, Hong Kong Ballet’s executive director, is unperturbed. “Somehow, more foreigners are focusing on Hong Kong’s situation than before,” she says.
“Hong Kong has a unique cultural identity, history and artistic achievements that can continue to resonate with international audiences, regardless of political considerations.” Lee adds that the US tour was sold out and Hong Kong Ballet is exploring further touring opportunities.
Romeo + Juliet, and not other, simpler and cheaper productions, was the right one to take abroad because it “tells a positive Hong Kong story abroad”, Webre insists, echoing the government’s exhortation to all Hong Kong cultural producers after the 2019 protests.
“Romeo + Juliet was the ideal choice because it really is an explosion of arts and culture from Hong Kong,” he adds, referring to its sets that features bamboo scaffolding, mahjong, kung fu and neon signs.
The Hong Kong Sinfonietta, as an orchestra playing Western classical music, focuses on the commonalities shared between different cultures.
“The music that we listen to, the music that we play are international. I think it’s necessary in this world that people don’t perceive too much difference between cultures and people. While we celebrate our own cultures, we should also pay attention to the common things that we have and we should share,” says Margaret Yang, the orchestra’s chief executive.
The orchestra made a point of including Hong Kong composer Daniel Lo Ting-cheung’s Autumn Rhythm II (2020) in its summer European concerts to promote the international profile of artists from the city.
The logistics of taking a full orchestra or ballet troupe on tour are daunting, and these trips are never profitable. But all the arts groups say they are essential.
The Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra has performed in 103 cities around the world, with many of the performances under the baton of its artistic director, Yan Huichang. The orchestra’s executive director, Celina Chin, says it has done a lot to promote Chinese musical tradition and its contemporary appeal to diverse audiences.
“Many people assume that the audience for our shows must all come from Chinatown. In fact, people in Chinatown are very busy!” Chin says.
The Sinfonietta’s music director, Christoph Poppen, says the orchestra’s performances in Europe received positive local reviews and attracted high-level attention. The president of Portugal and a large number of ambassadors from different countries had attended one of their concerts at Marvao, he adds.
“Certainly the Hong Kong Sinfonietta coming back from France and Portugal to Hong Kong after this tour is stronger than before. And these strengths, this experience will come back to the Hong Kong audience,” he says.
