Turning a reservoir into a concert hall: How artists have pushed their creative boundaries by staging productions in unconventional venues

Originally, the three envisioned staging their production at the better known Ex-Sham Shui Po Service Reservoir on Bishop Hill in Shek Kip Mei, which was declared a grade I historical building in 2021, and which hosts occasional public guided tours. “But because it’s a [sealed] area, they have to come up with this gigantic machine for pumping air into the space to ensure good ventilation,” says Lam. “It became too noisy for our show, which is intended to have minimalistic sounds and a poetic ambience.”

As the team continued to research, they came across the Western Salt Water Service Reservoirs and learnt that it had been used in a movie. They decided this space would be more feasible; the two caverns, each measuring about 50m long, 17.6m wide and 17m high, can each fit about 30 audience members and musicians. That’s not to say the logistics were straightforward—understandably, the service reservoirs aren’t equipped for a stage production. “We’ve had a lot of conversations with the Water Supplies Department about the electricity supply and where we can project the visuals,” says Lam.

All three artists have experience of creating unconventional productions. Siu, who was formerly the principal percussionist for the Macau Orchestra, felt his routine life of delivering assigned orchestral music and going on tours didn’t offer enough room for creativity. In 2012, he took a break from his role and founded Toolbox Percussion, an arts group that commissions new music and works with artists of different disciplines: photographers, choreographers, designers, visual artists and independent composers.

“I want to collaborate with different people for something more, something big,” he says. “Gradually, I realised the more contemporary art and music we create, the more we need to have a contemporary way of presenting them.” During the pandemic, lockdown restrictions inspired him to get creative and stage his shows in venues such as hotels, private galleries, art spaces and outdoor public playgrounds.

Meanwhile, Lee, currently a doctoral student at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has been creating experimental productions that push the boundaries of musical shows since 2009. She enjoys “challenging traditional notions of sound and traditional concert experiences”. She used to play the trumpet in the orchestra before university, but became “bored of playing the usual sort of repertoire. Instead, I became interested in creating new experiences for audiences.” In 2022, she composed a piece called Anew. In it, she plays with defying expectations—a violin bow is scraped across a cymbal; flautists blow into, instead of, across the mouthpieces of their instruments—to reflect the tensions, chaos and paranoia of the pandemic.

Lam, co-founder of new media art group Dimension Plus, who has a new media arts degree from New York University, focuses on using technology such as AI to create immersive audio-visual experiences. Like Siu, Lam works with artists across disciplines to create shows that push the limits of arts experiences. For example, for Reconnect 2023: New Canvas in Taiwan, he and a team of musicians turned National Taichung Theater into a mesmerising, cave-like structure with changing, AI-generated light projections, redefining the experience of a concert hall; in the installation TTTV Garden (2022-23) at Hong Kong Design Institute’s HKDI Gallery, real plants absorbed light from an LED panel above that played videos of an artificial aurora, to reflect on life in the digital age.

When Asia+ Festival, an arts festival established last year by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, asked Siu to create a new show for this year’s festival, he invited Lam and Lee, whom he had met separately, to join him. “We share a similar vision in the sense that we’re rebels. We look for rule-bending ways of presenting the arts that challenge the audience [and their conventional understanding of performances],” says Siu.

With their rock cavern collaboration, the three hope to encourage more people to explore the arts. “We want to use an undefined, cross-medium genre to attract people outside of our own discipline to explore new art forms,” says Lam.

Siu has an additional goal: to draw attention to the beauty and cultural value of hidden places in the city. “There are a lot of interesting places in our hometown which we never see as performance or cultural venues,” he says. He observes that the city focuses on building new concert halls or stadiums to fortify its international status as a cultural hub. “How about we simply [introduce] arts and culture into these very good places?”

After the Rain will be one of the performances featured at this year’s Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Culture and Arts Festival in October and November, an event expected to attract tourists from the rest of the GBA cities to Hong Kong. As well as showcasing local artistic talents, Siu hopes that shows like theirs will encourage both locals and tourists to explore Hong Kong’s history and cultural values—which, he says, is a key purpose of art.

“I hope that what we do is the starting point of opening up discussions of how we can use unconventional places to create performing arts, media art and all kinds of art.”

Credits

Photography Zed Leets

Photography assistant Carlos Hui

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