The One You Love is Sick

Trailer of the performance in Hong Kong, April 2010.

Getting Specific

Tom in the YAF Studio
Photo by Yuen Kin-leung Maru

I'm in a funk... the kind I only get into when I finish something that feels really important. Something about this last project in Hong Kong has left me in post-mortem meltdown. I can't quite put my finger on it, and Zach has done a really good job articulating much of what I also feel in his previous blog entries, but somehow the lyrics from the song we used in the Chapel sequence that keeps playing over and over again in my head seems to capture it best:

I know I tried,

but it's hard sometimes

the roots don't take,

it takes a while

and you pull at the strings

but they're broken, it seems

the dance isn't over for me

How do I put it to bed? Well, that's the rub. This time I don't want to neatly tie up the experience and catalog it among the works I've done. I want to use it to work my way into a broader engagement and deeper undertanding of what I feel I've only scratched the surface of.

It wasn't so much about the dance or the workshops themselves, but about the people and the site, learning to live again in a different context which somehow brought me back to the freshness I felt when I first fell in love--with dance, with another person, with a place--it's seeing what you already know anew, and then seeing something more that you never noticed. I'll try to be more specific. After all, we are all talking about specificity here.

Sometimes the images come so easily. Like the wall of hands and the sliding on the Chapel pews. I saw those in my head as soon as we walked on site with Maria Wong for our first visit prior to the workshops. I filed them away, determined to let them rest until they welded with an idea or opportunity within the workshops themselves... but I knew them already. The hands became a chorus of longing and need through the explorations and interpretations of the participants. The shuffling on the pews became an opportunity for levity in a heavy space, and a chance for each of the performers' idiosynchrasies to reveal snippits of personality within the group, popping out in sequence. I knew they were right. I knew it about the participants too. Sometimes it feels easier than it should, like decisions are making themselves.

Of course, I want more time with this, the process, the participants, the project, Hong Kong. It was rushed. The very nature of the project demanded it be, and it was also exactly what it needed to be, in terms of committment, body sustainability, time, money. But in terms of the emotional involvement, it felt like a tumultous relationship, burn fast and then burn out. I'll be pining away for years on this one. But what was it that made it so crazy?

I think the site had a lot to do with it. The traces of so much longing and caring, healing and dying color the walls with grief and with love. We don't often talk about that in site work, but everything that has ever happened in a site is accessible to the artist, especially those sensitive to it. Bethanie is a monument to human compassion and confusion, and you can't help but absorb the vibrations of everything that occured within the space. But mostly, I think it's about the connection between such a large group of strangers, who came together, and in the words of one of the participants, Derek, became not an organization but an organism. Kerry furthered the metaphor to the site itself saying that it felt like we entered its body through blood vessels and traveled into its heart. I think that's true. We definitely got at something big, but detailed too.

My regret is that we weren't able to be more comprehensive. We focused mostly on composition, in workshops, and then through the lens of the performance we created together. What we didn't cover was the politics, administrative nightmares, and headaches of securing a site, getting permissions, permits, and support--something that was lovingly done for us by the Hong Kong Youth Arts Foundation with the generous support of Aedas, and through the loan of the Bethanie site from the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts. And, really, there is no way to thank all of them enough, for creating and supporting this opportunity to work together and also build bridges between global arts communities, profoundly affecting us as individuals, collaborators, investigators...

We didn't talk about documenting the experience either. Though, I believe through the blog, videography component, photographs, etc, we set an example. Hopefully soon, we'll have a really kickin video and documentary to share.

And, we never really got as deep as we would have liked to into movement creation and choreography development through site inspiration. It almost seems as if several sub-workshops would've been necessary. I would certainly have liked to have gone further into exploring fresh vocabualry with the participants and also how developing a vocabulary off-site, can then be attuned and shaped or re-shaped into something that partners with the site. Ah well, next time when we do it for longer... I guess that's it, I felt like we all left wanting more--us, the participants, the audiences, everyone--wanting more from the site, from the time, and from each other. And, I guess that's not a bad thing. It's a powerful place to leave off, and in its not-so-subtle way, implies that there is more to be done. I am looking forward to the continuance of this work with the artists in Hong Kong, and finding ways to bring them to New York--to open a channel between the two cities and the artists who are making this important work, bringing dance and performance interventions into public spaces.

--Tom

Photos by Alz Ng

Process Overview

Photo by Alz Ng

We have been negligent updating the blog. After morning planning sessions, 8-hour rehearsals, and then evening debriefing/decompressing Tom and I found ourselves with no time to sit down and ruminate on what we were doing. Apologies for that.

Here’s a very abbreviated summary of our activities from this week.

• We spent Monday and Tuesday researching and learning about Bethanie’s physical/historical/cultural topography. This included a great visit to the BNP Paribas Museum of Bethanie.


• Having some background on the site, we started addressing the physical space. First by doing a site observation to identify the site’s overt (or hidden) architectural facets, and then beginning to explore this architecture. These explorations included guided improvisations, and choreographic exercises focused on identifying ways to repurpose space, physically engage with specific architectural elements, and create movement sequences borne from them.


• We played with some general choreographic images including a wall of hands (coming out of carved openings in the banister), an endless processional (taking advantage of Bethanie’s striking corridors), and creating a “Kerry conveyance,” by which we had one of the cast members emerge from a tiny, shuttered offering alcove.


• We continued these explorations by creating gesture-based phrases borne from our research and explorations.


• We then adapted these phrases to the site…having the entire ensemble do their individual choreography on Bethanie’s front façade.


• We continued choreographic explorations by creating active verb-based phrases on certain areas of the site. Duets or trios created movement scores based off of actions/tasks related to healing or sickness: i.e. to comfort, to bandage, to salve, etc.


• Groups did rigorous exploration in the chapel area, discovering a number of ways to climb up the walls, creep over pews, and fall off of them again.


• We spent Wednesday and Thursday focused on compositional concerns.


• We discussed “Unities,” a term Tom and I use to talk about the various ways create focus for the audience. We looked at where and how we’d already employed Unities, and other potential applications.


• We also spent quite a bit of time focusing on audience vantage points and creating an intuitive audience flow.


• We spent a good deal of Thursday and all of Friday refining, editing, and reworking the chorographic passages in preparation for the performance.

I learned so many things during this process, but there were three aspects in particular that stood out for me.

The first was a purely practical consideration: With Bethanie’s narrow corridors and verandas, how would one ensure that an audience of 40+ can see everything.

The short answer is you can’t.

More precisely, with our short creation period, this was the one challenge that we didn’t completely solve. Our biggest problem was that we had too many people who wanted to see the show. A fantastic problem to have! -- a poverty of riches.

We’d initially hoped to limit the audience to around 30 people per show in order to deal with these sightline issues. We’d also toyed with the idea of putting certain sections on a loop and allowing the audience to roam freely around the performance area. This would have alleviated some of the congestion if we’d had time to experiment with making this intuitive for the audience. However, we were again faced the issue of limited time and Bethanie’s narrow corridors, which could easily have become traffic jams in the making. In the end, we opted for a promenade format, where the audience moved as group from outside of Bethanie, through her corridors, to the chapel, and then out again.

The creation/discovery of this pathway was the second big thing that stood out for me. In every site-work, there’s this moment where you’ve got some solid material, you understand much of the site’s topography, and you’re starting to understand what the site is saying to you and how you’re responding—but you don’t yet understand how it all fits together. You’ve yet to unlock the internal logic of the piece and how it will settle onto the site.

Our early explorations and creations were borne from the site’s topography.That was our first point of entry or organizing principle. We started honing this when we refined the organizing principle to relate to our title "The One You Love is Sick”. But it finally gelled late in the week, when something clicked and the logic, through line, and pathway through the site and the piece became clear.

I think this was articulated beautifully in one of our participant’s written responses to the site. Kerry Liu wrote: “…I feel like I’m a tiny cell going through a body, entering from the blood vessel to the lung and finally I come to the heart of this building.”

This idea of Bethanie as a body or vessel that we were progressing through became the final idea around which we structured the piece:

The whole ensemble started outside, struggling in our individual phrases against Bethanie’s hard, rough façade. We came together to watch Kerry toiling to make her way down Bethanie’s front steps, and eventually be lifted and cradled by Lawrence who carried her inside, the front doors swinging open as they approached. We made our way as a procession into the central corridor, each having moments of collapse then being aided back to our feet. The group shattered then, having duets, trios, and solos that progressed through the building, each grappling with ideas of sickness, suffering, giving comfort and healing. We made our way to the chapel – truly the heart of the building – where the group playfully slid and tumbled along the pews. We reconvened to create a gestural choir of sorts. Beside us was a tiny, shuttered window that opened from the semi-circular room behind the chapel. From this window, Kerry emerged, was gently lifted and set on her feet (some saw this as an image of healing and rejuvenation). She led us out to the building’s side facade and the piece’s final image. Outside of Bethanie, Muriel found herself faced with a veritable wall of hands, which she washed and tended to, and who in turn lent her support and comfort.

This idea of passing through Bethanie on a journey from sickness to healing and eventual release had exactly the right feel.

The final thing that stuck out for me was on Thursday night, when Tom and I began to put ourselves in the piece. Up until that point we’d been working in a primarily directorial capacity. We hadn’t developed any choreography to do.

Instead of having us just make something up; our collaborators each gave us a gesture from their own material, from which we created a movement phrase. I loved being "gifted” movement and then having my collaborators make choreographic choices about how to adapt it to the areas where I danced.

Though Tom and I stuck ourselves into the piece at the last minute, we found ourselves organically integrated into the work. This was only possible because the material we were performing had come from our collaborators' own investigations, and the choreography that they set on us had come from their own week’s worth of experience molding movement to Bethanie’s architecture.

--Zach

Participant Responses to the Site

We asked each participant to write a short paragraph response to the site on Day Two after we had a chance to do a site-work overview as well as observation and exploration. Below are highlights from the collective responses, and below that, the full text from each participant. We have not edited the responses in any way, only typed them out for inclusion on the blog. Enjoy!

--Tom

Excerpts:

"Bethanie, there might be many stories in it" -- Maru

"I feel like I’m in a tiny cell going through a body,entering from the blood vessel to the lung and finally I come to the heart of this building." -- Kerry

"Knowing that it was used as a sanitorium, these characters do feel very much like the atmosphere of a nursing home or hospital. Also, after studying the inhabitants that were once here, I felt so much more in touch with them in their absence – than I did with the present inhabitants in their presence. " -- Derek

"The Bethanie is not soft, nor friendly, but it’s holy and demands respect." -- Lawrence

"Standing outside overlooking the South China Sea, my mind just wonders into the lives of these missionaries and the recovery process, what could have gone through their minds, their longing for home." -- Tommy

"The Bethanie site gives me a strong sense of frustration." -- Kayuen

"It made to think about a human. How to living and how human fight for their life." -- Odilia

"There is this smell when I first entered the main entrance of the building, a smell that many historical spaces own." -- Catherine

"It is the oldest western building I saw in Hong Kong... The pattern on the ground, the glass on the wall, the doors and the stairs… most of the things in Bethanie are symmetrical." -- Alz

"Enveloped in greenery, the sea view and the gentle breeze, I can feel its regenerative power." -- Gabrielle

"I experienced a sense of sinking deeper within myself, and only once I stepped into the chapel did I feel like I ever walked into a settled space and felt like I arrived." -- Muriel

'Her body, the wall of Bethanie, surprised me the most. It is not smooth at all, in fact, it is rough. It seems like she is trying to protect something or against something. The repeating patterns in Bethanie shows her patience or maybe she tries to remind us something." -- Rebecca

"I love the hardness of the site, the way it challenges us physically, emotionally, spiritually… so much inspiration, and that’s just in the density of the rock." -- Patricia

Other Full Responses to Site

Derek: Upon arriving to the Bethanie site – the surrounding nature and uplifted elevation is very warm and refreshing. The architecture and colors are very pretty and soothing to the eye. But, once walking through and around the premises, it has the opposite feeling. One of coldness, hallowness, coarsness, and hard. It’s very picturesque, but once you personally experience (walk, touch, sit, etc.) in the environment it has a very unsoothing vibe. Knowing that it was used as a sanitorium, these characters do feel very much like the atmosphere of a nursing home or hospital. Also, after studying the inhabitants that were once here, I felt so much more in touch with them in their absence – than I did with the present inhabitants in their presence.

Charles:

Peace.

in a great one piece

Where illness are healed, and where the sicks believe.
Tranquility.

from which comes creativity.

When my senses make, and where my body shakes.

Kerry:
Clean but bloody.I feel like I’m in a tiny cell going through a body,entering from the blood vessel to the lung and finally I come to the heart of this building.

Tommy: Bethanie to me is a very peaceful place, and where my friend got married. I didn’t know that it had such a great history of pain. The history of this sanitorium reflected to me on how determine people can be, the hard work they put in to help others. Standing outside overlooking the South China Sea, my mind just wonders into the lives of these missionaries and the recovery process, what could have gone through their minds, their longing for home.

Kayuen: The Bethanie site gives me a strong sense of frustration. One hundred years ago, the site was a spiritual place for religious purpose. But now, it is preserved as a Heritage something which can be accessed by tourists; and it is rent for the Academy of Performing Arts of Hong Kong for educational use. It seems spirituality is no longer there.

Gabrielle: I had never visited Bethanie before joining this workshop. The first impression that Bethanie gave me was that it is gorgeous and the neo-Gothic style building looks like it doesn’t belong on Hong Kong Island. Reviewing its history, it is easy to understand the geographical choice for this sanitorium. Enveloped in greenery, the sea view and the gentle breeze, I can feel its regenerative power. It’s so peaceful esp in the Chapel. But I can still feel a bit of tension from the rough walls. And there are so many symmetrical structures along with multiple frames. Everything is in order. With its history and architecture, I think it’s really a nice place for a site-specific performance.

Maru: Bethanie, there might be many stories in it. The white colour makes me feel peaceful. It’s like a hospital. But the most interesting is the mixed new and old things. I can dream that I am traveling in a time tunnel. I can go to the past. I can go to the future. And I most like the “box” before entering the Chapel. There, one two ground lights from the floor in front of the sides of the inner doors. If doors closed and just these two lights on, it can be a magic room that people inside can think about their life. The past and the future.

Lawrence: Strong – balanced, dominating. The space has power beyond its esthetic . The hallways are vessels of containment, you can feel surrounded and enclosed, watched by both the modern cameras and visitors that reside through resonating spirit. The depth is shallow, with a commitment to its shape. The Bethanie is not soft, nor friendly, but it’s holy and demands respect.

Alz: I know Bethanie because there is a model in HKAPA. The first time I saw it, I feel disconsolate. It look like a castle. It is the oldest western building I saw in Hong Kong. It is old but you can also say it is modern. HKAPA restored in 2003.
When I be there in Pokfulam, I really enjoy the natural light from its high, colorful glass and the view towards the Peak and outly islands. It’s very peaceful.
The pattern on the ground, the glass on the wall, the doors and the stairs… most of the things in Bethanie are symmetrical.
I enjoy to be dancing there. It is very artistic.

Muriel: A pitched roof, Flying buttresses and pointed arches proudly defend Bethanie on the outside. While on the inside: corridors lined with small rooms focus and lead to the chapel: the space with the tallest ceiling, high ribbed vaults, stained glass tableaux and the most light. The repetition of arches lining the verandah aid in creating a sense of balance, strength, security and safety. I loved noticing that the strong lines and security of the architecture is represented by stone or marble and the doors are of flexible, softer material: wood and light. Passing the arches, the beams of light and going through doors over and over again placed my mind in an active meditative space, I experienced a sense of sinking deeper within myself, and only once I stepped into the chapel did I feel like I ever walked into a settled space and felt like I arrived.

Keene: Bethanie have a over 100 years history. It experiences that the World War. The world financial problem. SAR, etc. It still here and also witness of Hong Kong everything. Bethanie grow up with Hong Kong and who love in there (HK). The building are full of Culture and Art feature. There architecture are full of it’s build feature. When I stay in the chapel I feel so sanctity and peaceful. And also means “Dead” and “Alive.”

Odilia: Is there have any ghost story? Full of secret here? Many people die in Bethanie?All these questions are around of human dying! First, I came there for my audition. I came to the theater room which are on the 2/F. It had a beautiful view to the harbor, and the glass housetop, a lovely sky view! And this is my second time to visit Bethanie, to know about the history there. It made to think about a human. How to living and how human fight for their life. The sunshine come into the Chapel, made me feel peaceful, all the love and sad here.

Rebecca: The first day I visited Bethanie, she was so calm. So peaceful and graceful. Bethanie was so silence, esp inside the chapel. I can hear the sound we made bouncing back from the wall. Her body, the wall of Bethanie, surprised me the most. It is not smooth at all, in fact, it is rough. It seems like she is trying to protect something or against something. The repeating patterns in Bethanie shows her patience or maybe she tries to remind us something.

Patricia: Bethanie is a hard site.

If you’d asked me yesterday I would have expanded on the rich history of the site – a kaleidoscopic layering of faith with healing, sanctuary with hospice, passion with restraint – and the haunting juxtaposition of its role today as a school of film & television – a surreal medium that allows for reality to be mirrored, captured, imposed, superimposed, created, edited, cropped, rewound, sped up.

I would have mentioned the symmetrical architecture with interesting potential for framing; the high ceilings that seem to highlight that separation of Earth and heaven, challenging me as a performer to try and cross that boundary, fill that space. The daily transformation the site goes under as the lighting changes with the journey of the sun and then the change into evening. And for me, I always find some of the most motivating aspects of a site are the different textures of the structures and how they look, feel and emote.

But after the fun exploration and developments yesterday, the only thing that strikes me about the site is that it is literally hard. An inventory of the bruises that colour my body, the marks they leave are inspiration in upon themselves. I love the hardness of the site, the way it challenges us physically, emotionally, spiritually… so much inspiration, and that’s just in the density of the rock.

Catherine: I’ve never been to Bethanie before until this Monday. I’ve always thought, from the pictures of the church, that it is a grandeur church situated in a piece of large greenery. It turned out to be a cozy, warm and welcoming little church housed in an elevated land, yet kept its privacy created by the plants surrounding it; a perfect space for a sanatorium in the past, and an educational space at present. It¡¦s like going to a resort every day, out from the city’s hustle life and dancing in such lovely space. There is this smell when I first entered the main entrance of the building, a smell that many historical spaces own. And the wall, the doors at the side, the patterns of tiles and the high ceiling all reminded me of my high school, which made the experience even more welcoming.

Evelyn:

welcome, says bethanie,
who sent forth its aura to embrace the lone visitor,
treading on its grounds for the first time,
ushering her way
through hollow hallways, hallowed halls.
nolstagia is written
in the air
she stood,
entranced, enthralled, captivated, spellbound,
held—
beyond words, beyond sounds, beyond thoughts way beyond bounds,
as if time has shifted through the embodied space,
life has inscribed itself through the walls that echo
their stories, untold stories.
but yet she is wary…
of the ghosts in the hallways
who peek at her, an intruder
into this sacred, holy place.
101 years, 101 deaths,
101 souls and ghouls, with long white beards,
creases in their foreheads, wrinkled eyelids that hid their glassy blue eyes,
in robes wrapped around their ailing bodies,
crucifixes around their necks.
101 years, 101 deaths,
101 souls who guarded this stone mansion
till their day of rest.
they stare,
down,
God-like,
shaking their baldy heads,
at the intruder, the traitor,
the blasphemer,
who has forgotten,
God’s face and His caring hand.

Photos from Day Three

Below are some visuals from our experimentations and rehearsal on site at Bethanie yesterday (Wednesday). We continued to talk about methods for composing site-specific work, with a focus on unities.

As of today, we are nearly finished with the material and composition of the piece, and our task now is to link those all together, figure out audience flow, costume design, lights and other technical components.

More to come, but in the meantime, we'd als

o like to share a link to another blog series by one of the project participants, Evelyn Wan:

http://lublub.xanga.com

Warm-up

Discussion

Experimenting On Site & in the Studio

Participants working in the YAF Studio

Over the past two days, we have been on site and in the studio with the Aedas My Footsteps participants. It's been fast and furious. We are already about halfway done with the work we are creating together. For the first part of day one, we had several discussions about the nature of site work and the particular site for this project. We gave a short overview of our research into the history and features of the space, and together, all took a tour of the BNP Paribas museum of Bethanie at the location in Pok Fu Lam.

Then, we began our site observation and initial site explorations. Afterwards, we returned to the studio to further explore movement motifs and gestures that were informed by the site, and worked through methods of translating those ideas into short, repeatable movement sequences which we also tweaked compositionally to discover various ways of putting them together.

Yesterday was day two of the process, and we started as a group in the front of Bethanie, working our individual phrases into a group sequence and fitting that to the front veranda and facade. You can see our early experiments in the video below.

Afterwards, we split up into groups on site in order to maximize our time, experimenting with the various architectural and compositional possibilities throughout the verandas, hallways and in the chapel. We finished the day again back at the YAF studio where we worked with several groups of participants to deepen the movement we'd created on site earlier in the day. Whew!

-Tom

Balancing Acts

Zach Walking the Dragon's Back

My main thought for the past 24 hours has been how glad I am that we decided to come to Hong Kong a week ahead of starting the Aedas My Footsteps project here. Of course, we’ve already been working, thinking, and planning, but it’s nice to have time to slowly acclimate and find the ways in which to immerse ourselves and also gain respite from that immersion. Balance. Good to know where you are before you start throwing yourself off walls and dancing through corridors and catacombs somewhere up a mountain in Pok Fu Lam!

Today was a bit about that. Zach and I took a hike on the Dragon’s Back along the South China Sea (on the east side of the island) and down into the village of Shek-O. It was a trip I’d made last time we were in Hong Kong, and there was the comfort of the familiar in it, the excitement of sharing it with Zach, and the relief of getting away from the bustle up in the North. Hong Kong is magical to me in that way, that you can be in one of the most relentlessly vertical and densely populated places on Earth one minute, and several minutes later, alone in the jungle. Zach is surprised that I don’t feel claustrophobic here. I do in New York sometimes, but Hong Kong is 40% green space. I think knowing how easily you can escape is the reason I find it livable.

Sand Sculpture on Shek-O Beach

After arriving in Shek-O, and touring the tiny beach, we settled into a village restaurant we’d discovered in 2007 and shifted back into business mode. Tomorrow, the workshops begin.

We are balancing two agendas for this project: an educational series designed to share our methods for creating site-specific performance with a group of professional participants, and the creation of a new work for the Bethanie in Pok Fu Lam which will feature all of us.

Zach and I have been tossing around ideas and impressions for the last several days. A usual, our separate perspectives and interests cover a pretty wide range, so our agenda thus far has been to hone in on those that overlap or meet in informative ways. Zach is churning away on the historical links with the French missionaries, the Jesus/Lazarus connection, and the sanatorium while I’ve been turning over movement motifs that pull from impressions I got on our site visit this past week [See Zach's previous entry, "McDonald’s and the Missions Etrangeres de Paris PART 1"].

When we toured the Bethanie site on Thursday, I let myself free-flow with image and movement fantasies while walking through. Having developed a site-specific checklist with Zach over the years, I am quick to cycle through all of my assessment items. What can go there? How can that support weight? What is the purpose of this? And, how can it be re-purposed? What is hidden? How do I expose it? What will unify this vast space? And, how can I force a different perspective for my audience here? All of my historical, social, and contextual research steps aside as I let my eyes, ears, nose, and fingers take over.

The Chapel at Bethanie

I imagined a group sequence within the chapel, shuffling in and out of the aisles and gliding inverted among the pews, forcing audience perspectives from the doorway to the altar. Along the verandas and down the steps, I see opportunities for intimate, almost “overheard” moments: a solo on the front steps, multiple reveals around the corners and through the long hallways, turns in and out of small frames within the architecture (almost like portholes) and images of suspension in the “cathedral” spaces between features. I hear echoes. I smell rain. Most things feel cold. The pews are remarkably warm in contrast to the stone. There is a little something sweet in the air that you can almost taste. So, we weigh it all together and strike a balance, between images and senses, history and architecture, our imagination and the site’s reality, our assumptions and those of the participants, who we meet tomorrow.

- Tom

McDonald’s and the Missions Etrangeres de Paris PART 1:

Zach in Aberdeen

I went to McDonald’s this morning.

I totally bought my coffee there. In my defense, it was a last resort. I couldn’t find anything else in the area that sold coffee to take-away (to go).

I, very conscientiously, haven’t been inside fast-food restaurant for over 5 years. I dislike them, and feel that they often embody many of the things I dislike about American consumerism and the overwhelming impact corporations have on our daily lives.

And yet….

Standing in line, I was deeply conscious of how stupid it was being an American, buying American coffee at an American-based fast-food chain while surrounded by the myriad other options that Hong Kong offers.

Sometimes, you just need your coffee to go, yo.

More precisely, sometimes you need the reassuring comfort of familiar rituals and patterns.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m loving Hong Kong. Not at all yearning to return to the States.

I’m just noting, with some degree of amusement, how I’m coping with being a foreigner here. I consider myself a pretty savvy, adventurous traveler. I’m pretty much down for anything. But still, I’m noting that, even though there’s a Circle K, 7-11, or KFC on every corner; even though English is spoken nearly everywhere, even though this was city borne out of westernized expansion and commerce, I’m still grappling with notions of foreignness.

And of course, in light of the project we’re about to embark on, this all broaches the question:

If I’m grappling with being a stranger in a strange land, how must these French Missionaries have felt?

…. I bet it was really, really hard for them to find coffee to go.

Bethanie served missionaries who’d been working throughout Asia. These priests were often the vanguard of westernization. They were quite literally placing themselves in contexts and cultures that were utterly unfamiliar and unknown.

For many of them, Bethanie was a haven. A place that provided succor, and where they sought solace, healing, rest.

So In light of all of this, I’m pondering: What is the nature of foreignness? Why are we rattled by that which is alien? Are we such creatures of habit that unfamiliar customs panic us? What are the things, the rituals that give solace? Why is it easy to get along with a single stranger, but a mass of strangers seems intimidating? Where is the line between the foreign and the familiar?

Tom and I are about to hike the Dragon’s Back to Shek-O, a village on the South East of the Island. As I make ready to go, I’m thinking about these entries I found on the on-line thesaurus:

Foreign: alien, alienated, antipodal, barbarian, barbaric, borrowed, derived, different, distant, estranged, exiled, exotic, expatriate, external, extralocal, extraneous, extrinsic, far, far-fetched, far-off, faraway, from abroad, immigrant, imported, inaccessible, nonnative, nonresident, not domestic, not native, offshore, outlandish, outside, overseas, remote, strange, transoceanic, unaccustomed, unexplored, unfamiliar, unknown

Succor/Solace: comfort, help, mitigation, refuge, relief, rescue, support, aid, ameliorate, assist, avail, be good for, better, build, contribute to, do for one, relieve, serve, succor, allay, alleviate, buck up, cheer, comfort, condole with, console, mitigate, soften, soothe, upraise, assuage

- Zach

Tom in Central

Bethanie, An Overview

Bethanie in Pok Fu Lam

Hello Blogsphere,

I’m writing a few days after arriving. Still turned around and have not yet totally reacclimatized to being back in Hong Kong. The dim sum is helping, though.

Tom and I just did our first visit to Bethanie, the site where next week we begin the Aedas My Footsteps masterclass series and performances.

Bethanie is fantastic. It is architecturally beautiful. Its grounds are gorgeous. And most exciting for me, the site has a rich, convoluted history. It’s riddled with all sorts of cultural/social complexities and contradictions. Exactly the type of site I get jazzed about.

It is a perfect site to begin teaching and collaborating with a new group of artists.

Following is a reader’s digest history of the site:

Bethanie was built between 1873 and 1875 by French Missionaries to be the first sanatorium in this part of the world. Built in Pok Fu Lam – some distance from the congested Central area of Hong Kong Island – Bethanie was designed as a haven to serve priests suffering from long term health issues and recovering from the rigors of missionary work. Initially, Bethanie included a chapel, 14 bedrooms for ailing priests as well as a service wing and several other rooms.

Bethanie operated as a sanatorium for 101 years. In the interim, it weathered an occupation by the Japanese during WWII and dealt with the repercussions of the Communist revolutions in 1949. Sold to Hongkong Land in 1974, Bethanie seemed doomed to demolition. However, the government resumed the site in 1975, and it was eventually listed as a heritage building. In 2003 the Hong Kong government allocated Bethanie and two octagonal cowsheds (which neighbored the site) to the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts. In 2006 Bethanie re-opened and currently houses the Academy’s School of Film and Television.

The site has undergone several expansions and renovations in its history. Most notably, the renovation efforts prior to its re-opening in 2006, when the Academy spearheaded an effort to modernize the building, refurbish the site, and restore many of the original elements including the altar, main and chapel doors, statues, and stained glass.

-Zach