Lighthouse - A Dance / Performance by Stella Tsui & Brian Ting
Intimate Inner Dialogues about Life & Death at Private Homes
About Lighthouse
Attempting to document the stretched capacity of life, Lighthouse explores the dialogues one can have with oneself in a seemingly daily setting at contemporary time, and celebrates life and death. The work is a tribute to photographer Francesca Woodman and a dear artist / activist friend Chin Tangerine who passed away in 2015.
The tour is supported by the Arts Development Fund of the Home Affairs Bureau, the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
“THIS ACTION THAT I FORESEE
has nothing to do with melodrama.
It is that life as lived by me now is a series of exceptions…
I was (am?) not unique but special.
This is why I was an artist…”
Francesca Woodman
What experience would Lighthouse bring you?
Lighthouse brings slices of the stretched capacity of life and invites both the performers and the audience to take a closer look at their own lives. On an art exploration level, the experience of performing at a private home is definitely strange and refreshing when we see strangers stand close to us with daily life stuff such as a refrigerator and a toilet in sight.
Lighthouse is a highly intimate piece, not just in terms of the content but the space, as audience will be in someone’s semi-transformed living space witnessing, documenting or even shaping the dialogues that Stella the performer makes with herself in the performance. The piece is intimate with time as well: our lighting relies principally on sunlight, as the performance progresses, the angle, the intensity, and even the colour of sunlight gradually change, we can hence establish a dialogue with this slow transformation of time.
How was it like when Lighthouse was first presented?
Lighthouse was presented at a private house on an island, Cheung Chau, in Hong Kong at a one-day arts hunt named Guest Host Ghost which showcased arts in 12 unconventional spaces in December 2015. 3 performances were made from 2pm onwards to sunset with the interval of 1-1.5 hours. Each time around 8-16 people came in the house while some others could watch part of the performance outside the house. We designed the piece in such a way that the audience was implicitly invited to enter this space of intimacy and became a collective of voyeurs. They had to travel through the confined space of the house, to peep through low-light environment or visually semi-covered space. Despite the limited capacity of the house, many audiences liked the piece, especially the last performance in which we received enthusiastic applauses. We had a diverse audience coming from artsy crowd to ordinary people. A few took photos during the performance and shared them with us after the performance, making an interesting twist to voyeurism. Everyone took bits and pieces that they liked and resonated with the piece in their own ways.
Our Artistic Experiment
Getting Inspirations from Different Corners on the Globe
After performing Lighthouse in Hong Kong, we figured it was really lovely and fun to do a performance in an intimate setting and we felt that it has the potential to grow. Seeing the opportunity of the experimental and diverse Nordic Fringe Network, we thought it might be a good idea to take up a bigger challenge and share the work with interesting audiences - develop Lighthouse differently from the backbone according to different settings of each private home. Each performance will thus be unique.
Currently we are based in 2 different places - Australia (Stella) and Hong Kong (Brian). Stella will first fly out to Vienna for ImPulsTanz in August to further develop the choreography intensively and then together with Brian we will travel to different private homes in Stockholm for Stockholm Fringe Festival, Bergen for NO Fringe Festival Bergen and Melbourne for Melbourne Fringe.
We are looking for more opportunities to share this work with audiences around the world!