ROZANNA LILLEY*
FROM THE HEART
l hope I have said enough in these somewhat random remarks to indicate that currently in Hong Kong there is disorientation and a feeling of vulnerability in relation to impending sovereignty transferral and that this uncertain fragility was magnified by the Tiananmen Square massacre. Zuni Icosahedron members are not immune to these feelings. Speaking to me in the Wanchai office of the company about the immediate responses in the territory to the 1989 protests on the Mainland, Danny Yung, artistic director of Zuni Icosahedron, described the enormous sense of shock and the desire to positively respond which these events generated:
There was a lot of creative energy and the reason why it was creative is because it came from the heart. When it's out there it's out there and you can just sense it and people will do it spontaneously with no contriving. Because I remember when we were laying out the bedsheets over here and we just found whatever paint we could, we found whatever sticks or bamboo poles we could to hold those sheets up and we made do with everything because we all just wanted to participate in the demon-stration and there's a lot of creative energy in it and it's there - you can sense it. Not only here but everywhere and during the march.
I remember this one big character we did which was rather interesting and also kind of sad because it was in "89 in May. At one point the news we heard was that the government finally decided to have a dialogue with the students. So the whole demonstration we had organised almost became a celebration and then on the 24th everything suddenly turned around. We were writing, we were trying to pick out words that could reflect how we felt. So I remember I put down one character which meant "mourning". It was one character and the reason I chose one character is, as I kept saying,: "Hey, let's do one bedsheet and the most visible way, the most pow-erful way is to do only one character on one bedsheet and the bedsheet looks like a mourning screen at a Chinese funeral". And then somebody else suggested we should say that this is mourning for the death of democracy. And the person who we dedicated this to was Li Peng. So it became an ironic thing.
Anthropological 1Vutdwuks, Ill!
I remember we did that and it was captured by all the television crews, that pat1ic-ular character, and then during the next three days I saw on the news that Shenzhen was doing the same thing. It was very visible. That's why the television picked it up and from then on everybody else. You know how TV can spread the news.
include this lengthy quotation because it underlines that palpable shock and rage, the dynamic of hope abridged which Hong Kong citizens registered in that year. I also include it because it illustrates the sense of stillness which Zuni Icosahedron tried to recover in the midst of all that loud, noisy history. Later, Danny Yung attempted to restore that still rage, to remind people of the necessity for keeping an engaged distance, in a production titled The Square: Deep Structure of Chinese (Hong Kong) Culture; a production that was as much stern unappeased vigil as it was performance.
Initially, Yung was reluctant to undertake a performance on this subject: "I felt it didn't make sense to do anything on stage because the entire street was like a stage at that time, with demonstrations of one and a half million people in Hong Kong; the scale seemed completely wrong; the creative energy was out there" (The Independent 17/5/1990). But driven by the knowledge that "1997 is something that's definitely on people's mind, dealing with the Chinese government is definitely on people's mind and if they have to deal with the government they have to deal with June 4; it's in their mind and it's part of their culture -there's no way to take that away", Yung persisted. He arrived at an austere piece which para-doxically embodied, in carefully inscribed images of chaos and disarray, the tyranny of Hong Kong's political positioning, a tyranny less than subtly alluded to in the choice of two songs which were repeatedly broadcast through the theatre: the ironic contrast between Lando/Hope ancl Glory and kindergarten children singing "China is a big garden, the warm sun shines brightly, everybody is happy and gay" was not lost on anybody.
Yet it wasn't all so obvious. Indeed, the bracketing of "Hong Kong" in the title of the piece clearly indicated the exploration of the proximity between mainland Chinese and their Hong Kong compatriots and the cultural distance separating them. The performance began with four figures wearing the uniforms of the People's Liberation Army guarding the stage, their backs to the audience. Pacing figures crossed and recrossed the floor, scrims delineated several increasingly opaque playing spaces, the simple steps of the Maoist "loy-alty dance" and the "peasants" dance" repeatedly reminded the audience of bodily propa-ganda.10
A black curtain finally lifts to reveal the horizon, a huge blank back wall, the wings, the stage machinery. The revelation of artificiality was carefully positioned between a kind of austere optimism and the desolation of exposure. The centre of energy remained the spaces between. For me, this stark image of what is behind and between is a necessary com-plement to the more widely publicised images of demonstrating masses. It restored a sense of what is possible and a sense of the crushing weight of current historical circumstances and left me wondering whether the politicizing of art is the specular image of the aestheti-cizing of politics. The emptiness Yung opened up was the abyss where our identities and
10 Vong ko communist drama was derived from this peasants' dance originating in Shcnsi Province. Its easy steps and c[e[lr dr,1ma-tisation were considered ideal vehicles for Maoist propaganda (Hsu 1985: 14, 15).
Ro::anna Lilley: Playing the 1vfo111<'11t ...
images run the risk of being engulfed. Walking a tightrope, he wondered whether he should allow himself to be walled in or make a play out of it.
ln his Programme Notes to this perfonnance, Yung (1991) was at pains to discon-cert the audience by insisting that in The Square there is no conclusion, that Zuni Icosahedron are continuously searching, trying to say something that they can't even under-stand. He went on to comment:
... deep inside the stage there's a wall. And my heart sinks again. The stage is sort of like a book. You flip through page after page and there are a lot of high points -the pleasure of reading. And when you finish reading a book, when you flip -the last page, all this pleasure is hanging up there. Maybe it's not important. Maybe the important thing is what's between one book and reading another book, between one performance and another performance and between one piece of work and between another piece of work.
This article too is about what is at stake between: between performances, between China and Britain, between conjuring with the false unity of "Hong Kong identity" and imagina-tively mapping out the unknown. The images that I have been replaying for you - the homo-sexual couples, the PLA soldiers, the angry crowds, the lilting verses of children - cannot be seen as contributing to any general model of Hong Kong identity. The keywords and phrases that signify the things that really matter democracy, identity, Hong Kong people -are not fixed in static definitions but constantly subject to contestation as different subjects, at different moments, seek to hegemonize discourses which support their vision of the future. But that is not all. If you hold in your mind that image of the long, receding distance to the back wall and the vast see-through wings, this need to play the moment, to make a scene, will guide you through the following two years.
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