Organised by the Hong Kong Arts Festival and solely sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, HKartsFestival@TaiKwun is returning in 2024 from 24 February to 3 March. Since 2019, the project has engaged the public and visitors from outside Hong Kong with a range of innovative programmes at the historical site of Tai Kwun.

This year’s programmes aim to evoke our memories of the past and reconnect us with what we have been cherishing. With a history of more than 170 years, Tai Kwun will play host to various site-specific immersive performances by artists from Canada, Norway, Belgium, Latvia, the USA, Japan, Singapore and Greater China. Participatory performances will take place throughout the day and night to bring the audience inside the artists’ visions. Artists, participants and audiences alike will “make memories night and day” together in the 2024 HKartsFestival@TaiKwun.

fashion machine is a fun show about upcycling fashion. After receiving training from artists of The Other Guise Company (Canada) from the fields of textiles, theatre and photography, local secondary students will interview members of the audience about their memories and stories linked to an item of their clothing. The lucky ones will be invited as models into the fashion machine in which their outfits will be remade within 50 minutes. The audience members/models will then don their remade outfits and showcase their “memorable” new looks in a red carpet catwalk show with commentary by the youngsters. fashion machine fosters the creativity of the next generation of upcycling fashion artists and represents an exciting new form of performance art that also helps raise awareness about sustainability.

carry on is a site-specific performative guided tour, entirely refigured for each new location. It interacts with the architectural space of each site, and transcends its past, present and future. Since 2014, the project has been recreated for different spaces in Japan, Belgium, Latvia, Germany and Norway, among other countries. In the Hong Kong version, audience members will be taken on a guided tour through back rooms, vestibules, interstices and other unnoticed areas in Tai Kwun, where they will find reminders of history and simultaneously leave traces of their own, to finally arrive at unexpected discoveries. These inaccessible, hidden and unnoticed details are going to transform Tai Kwun into a fascinating alternative version of itself!

In the big things and the tiny little things, three common species in Hong Kong, namely sparrows, mushrooms and bees, are sometimes transformed into two-metre-tall puppets and sometimes shrunk in the stories of the “memory docents” and hidden in their storytelling miniature huts. In this disorienting performance where creatures grow large and small, our urban memories are woven together. The show looks at the complex symbiotic relationship between nature and the city from perspectives both big and small.

Non-visual sensory creation an essential guide to a blindfolded journey is about the memories of a person with acquired blindness, about what he remembered before losing his sight. These memories, although fragmented and blurred, are always emotionally vivid. With the help of a group of guides recruited from the community, blindfolded participants will be accompanied into a maze of sensory experience on the Tai Kwun Parade Ground to recover the authentic truth that can only be sensed but not seen. The maze is open to the public outside the performance hours, and all are welcome to explore this sensory playground where they can see without watching.

Disco was all the rage in the ‘70s and ‘80s. disco forever is a tribute to this era and all of its oldies-but-goodies memories! Regardless of age or gender, modern retro hipsters will meet disco regulars from the good old days and share the joy of dancing together. Follow the Party Host to stretch your sexy body, which may be feeling the strain of life. In addition to DJs on weekend nights, there are also noon dance sessions for daytime layabouts and overworked office workers in Central to be revitalised during lunch breaks.

Taking inspiration from Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, arts delivery 3.0 ventures into the art of storytelling and features a character simply named the Deliveryman as its protagonist. The Deliveryman, played by the audience, links the memories of this city and its people while following seemingly unrelated courier orders in Tai Kwun after dark. As the story unfolds, more connections will surface from reminiscences on the past, the here-andnow experience and the outlook for the future. The original creative team behind arts delivery from Macao will team up with local award-winning playwright Wang Haoran to release this beta version 3.0 to test how the story may evolve. The ending of the story is yet “to be confirmed”.

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun is part of the 52nd Hong Kong Arts Festival The project is solely sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust Partner: Tai Kwun

HKartsFestival@TaiKwun runs from 24th February to 3rd March 2024. For more information about the Hong Kong Arts Festival, visit hk.artsfestival.org.