Imagine, what would your ideal playground look like?
What kind of space is it? Should it be indoor or outdoor? How about its light and colours? What kind of facilities are there? Do you hear any sounds or music? How would it smell?
The ideal playground varies among people of different ages, generations, backgrounds and lifestyles. Playground is more than just a 'playground'. It can be a mental outlet, for one to faintly drift from the everyday mundane/reality (or even the present life), to pursue a moment of happiness.
Designed and led by creators across media, the project employs ‘playground’ as the metaphor, adopts varied means and formats of creation and experience, and looks for different directions and dimensions of imagining a playground.
The eyes is the gate through which we contemplate the world, capturing everything before us; we listen to different sounds, be they pleasant or irritating, flood into the maze of our thoughts. In the end, whether they are faint impressions, or unforgettable people and things so intense that they have become muscle memory, everything will turn to merely fragmented cache, that one day assemble into a story of ambiguous memories. Memory itself may already be a playground. Countless stories occur in life, first-hand or hearsay, which ones are worth recording, and which ones have so dispersed?
Guided by film director Cheuk Cheung and multidisciplinary artist Elysa Wendi, we will learn to be the director of our individual recollections, to search, integrate and represent alongside our own stories and memories.
We are so accustomed to let visual sensors dominate our lives, that numerous sounds pass unconsciously 'hear without hearing', not to mention the urge to trace their source. Sound artists advocate 'deep listening', reminding us that there is never a moment of silence in our world, that we can stop thinking and just listen, and perhaps 'music' beyond imagination can so be heard.
The recorder and the speaker, for recording and for transmitting, can be very practical in daily life, or can miraculously lead us to discover/dig out sounds. Between 'recording' and 'playing', they analyse, select, create and construct sonic experience with installations/performances.
Sound designer and field recordist Kan Hei-chun (AK), together with media artist Jasper Fung, appropriating their experience in listening and soundscape/music composition, will steer participants to probe into the possibilities of sound.
Juggling is a performing art, but sometimes more like magic, mysterious, whimsical and bewildering.
Like magicians, performers use every body part to connect all sorts of props, not only to showcase skills accumulated over years, but also deliver striking visual effects. The study of body coordination varies among individuals. As each performance differs, the so-called success or failure contains little to no meaning. Everyone can indeed play with his/her own style, and be a person full of magical imagination.
Incorporating multiple media including dance, visual art and music, the three juggling artists/instructors conjure hula hoop dancing, ball juggling and contact juggling to open up performers' body consciousness, and enable audience to focus on the presence, and altogether enter a magical stage detached from reality.
Led by three groups of artists over the past year, participants in "Playground as Metaphor" have been searching for their personal ‘playgrounds’ in the city through rendering memories and stories, soundscapes and installations, bodies and images.
Digging in memories, stories, tales, streets, downtown, bodies, props, rhythms, soundscapes and more, unique pulses and accents are unearthed.
A documentary video will be produced and published online soon.
Programmes conducted in Cantonese.
All activities of the scheme are free of charge.
Curated and produced by:
Supported by :
Programme Enquiries:
Leisure and Cultural Services Department
2591 1340
Programme and Enrolment Enquiries:
No Discipline Limited
playgroundasmetaphor@gmail.com
Website: www.nodisciplinelimited.hk
Facebook / Instagram: No Discipline Limited
Presenter reserves the right to change the programme, instructors/artists should unavoidable circumstances make it necessary.
The content of programmes does not represent the views of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.