"Call & Response" Executive Summary

How can artists respond to a community, its histories, and impending urban redevelopment in the context of creative placemaking policies? Spearheaded by the art collective If Time’s Limited, “Ivy Says” brings together memories and imaginations of existing and past residents of Tai Kok Tsui, and draws from the district’s evolving urban fabric to create a community performance. Through intergenerational exchange, participants of all ages create deep maps of Tai Kok Tsui, as a basis for dialogue and performance-making.

Guided by the concept of doing dramaturgy, the project employs a Call and Response dialogic framework to design a community-engaged arts process, activated through a series of workshops and a final performance. ‘Call and response’ is rooted in improvisational music and dance traditions—such as tap and percussion—where performers echo and play with one another’s rhythms and movements. We expanded this concept into a dramaturgical process, where artists and community facilitators listened to the ‘calls’ of Tai Kok Tsui’s streetscapes and responded through original music, handmade instruments, dance, prose and poetry.

This booklet chronicles the project’s process and theoretical underpinnings, and in particular, its dramaturgical design. Through the project, we propose a process-oriented dialogic dramaturgy for community-engaged arts, inspired by Janet Pillai’s ‘dialogical dramaturgy’, and Maaike Bleeker’s ‘doing dramaturgy’. While more traditional forms of dramaturgy focus on the transposition of page to stage, contemporary forms of doing dramaturgy considers process as key, and aims to develop content, narrative, aesthetic, and creative direction through the research and development process. In this process, the focus on dialogue is crucial, as community arts projects ought to foster social engagement through the sharing of experience, opinions, and civic discussions amongst participants. In “Ivy Says”, we built the project through dialogues with the community as well as with the space of Tai Kok Tsui itself.

Our process-oriented dialogic dramaturgy is thus composed of three key elements—research, institution-making, and performance-making.

Research:

Research is foundational to the entire project. The first phase is to conduct desk research and fieldwork, and compile materials and relevant keywords. Based on this, one can envision the direction and content of the project. Hands-on research is particularly suited for community art projects as this allows the team to understand the intricacies of a community. For example, they can ask questions about history, people, and space, and gather relevant information.

In our research, we position ourselves as knowledge facilitators, and we enter Tai Kok Tsui with the humility and openness to learn from the true ‘experts’ of the community – the residents themselves. Our aim is to open their eyes to see themselves as ‘researchers’ too – their everyday knowledge of the neighbourhood is an integral part of Tai Kok Tsui’s local knowledge. Where do they go for the best milk tea? What are the hidden shortcuts through the industrial complexes? Which playground is best suited for children? These local knowledges may take the forms of embodied knowledge and sensory knowledge, and may be legible only to local residents.

To elicit such knowledges, we used ‘deep mapping’, as proposed by theatre scholar Mike Pearson and archaeologist Michael Shanks. ‘Deep maps’ assemble different textures, facts, stories, memories, and imaginations about a place, and capture multidimensional knowledge of a place far beyond traditional street maps. Such maps can take the form of different media too, such as text, drawings, audiovisual materials, performance, etc., expanding the possibilities of what neighbourhood maps might look like. Our interview video series, informed by arts-based ethnography, invited interviewees to share their experiences and imaginations of Tai Kok Tsui as their former or current home.

In this research process, we emphasised embodied and sensory knowledges over technical facts about Tai Kok Tsui. In our workshops with community facilitators recruited from the neighbourhood, we activated their sensuous exploration of their bodies and memories through improvisational dance techniques and theatrical games. These exercises engaged the five senses, and helped refine their observations about their lived experience of Tai Kok Tsui. Moreover, younger and older facilitators gathered and shared their stories about the neighbourhood under the banner of this project, which facilitated knowledge exchange across different generations.

Building upon research conducted by other partners in the RE: Tai Kok Tsui project, our research process brought together not only official historical narratives of Tai Kok Tsui’s development arc but also the micro-histories of the place, through embodied knowledge, sensory knowledge, and transgenerational knowledge. Such knowledges formed a rich tapestry of memories and imaginations, or a deep map if you will, of Tai Kok Tsui, which established a solid basis for our creative exploration.

Institution-making:

An assembled team forms a temporary institution under the banner of the project. A temporary collective, tailored for the project, allows artists to be flexible and responsive to the specificities of a neighbourhood. This avoids the top-down imposition of established protocols and working methods, and instead builds creative direction and aesthetics from the bottom up. A departure from traditional hierarchical structures of theatre companies, our idea of institution-making is based on collaboration, where each member is given the opportunity to shape the direction of the creative process. From this perspective of collaborative making, the team can work together to co-create outcomes. Members of the local community can also join in to co-create the performance with professional artists.

Our project generated a temporary collective by integrating community facilitators with professional artists, in dramaturgical response to the characteristics of Tai Kok Tsui. These special characteristics were analysed through the traditional Chinese framework of five elements (wuxing): wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Given the significance of Tai Kok Tsui’s shipbuilding and metalwork industries, metal stood out as the key aesthetic element. As such, we curated artists who play with metallic elements in their practice, specifically handpan music and tap dancing, to join our team. Inspired by the neighbourhood, they created original instruments and dance steps to respond to the clink, clang, clatter of metallic sounds prominent in the streetscapes. In addition, to involve Tai Kok Tsui’s home-grown artists, we invited street dancers who rehearse around Olympic MTR Station to share their memories of dancing around Tai Kok Tsui with the audience. 

We also recruited a diverse team of community facilitators to co-create the final performance with our professional artists. The community facilitators came from all walks of life, and while our youngest facilitator was in their twenties, our oldest was in their sixties. Amongst them were social workers, teachers, retired individuals, and community arts enthusiasts. They have lived or worked in the area for varying lengths of time, making their bodies markers of Tai Kok Tsui’s different facets and stages of development. Across six intensive workshops, they wrote accounts of what Tai Kok Tsui meant to them, designed audience journeys through the area, and underwent movement and dance training.

In this assembly of performing artists and community facilitators, we emphasise the multiplication of voices and the building of a community within a community arts project. On the one hand we encouraged each performing team (music, tap dance, street dance) to respond to Tai Kok Tsui in their own unique artistic way. On the other, we allowed collectivity and a shared identity to emerge and unfold through joint training. True to the idea of ‘call and response’, we trained through structured improvisations, by listening to each other’s artistic language, and responding through rhythm and movement. These exercises allowed the team to bond and build a shared movement language for the final performance. This mode of co-creation was eventually staged in the final performance itself, as we invited the audience to join in and ‘converse’ with the performers through movement, and to experience for themselves this remarkable sense of emergent community.

Performance-making:

Dramaturgy can be used to support the production of post-dramatic theatre. The term ‘post-dramatic theatre’ as proposed by Hans-Thies Lehmann (1999) describes the shift from text-based drama to post-dramatic performances. Such performances tend to abandon text-driven plots and dramatic narrative structures, and replace stage lines with movement, sound, or visual effects. Post-dramatic performances often blur the boundaries between theatre, dance, music, multimedia, and installation art. They have the tendency to remain open to audience interpretation, and may even encourage the audience to abandon ‘passive viewing’ and take ownership of the performance experience.

“Ivy Says” was a site-specific post-dramatic performance in which audience members traversed the neighbourhood to watch and participate in different performances. We opted for this form to emphasise Tai Kok Tsui itself as stage. Site-specific performance stresses the performativity of place – watch children play chase through the lens of performance and it appears as choreography; observe the strategically placed street corner chairs for neighbourly chit-chats and you might be watching scenography come to life. From this perspective, performance and everyday life collide in the streets.

Our performance-making dramaturgy is inspired by the work of Maaike Bleeker and Elinor Fuchs, in which Bleeker builds upon Fuchs’s suggestion that the world of a performance is a ‘small planet’. The idea is to understand a performance as a world of its own, in which all elements relate to one another in multi-layered, and at times fragmentary ways. We found it most important to define the world of Tai Kok Tsui as a ‘small planet’, with its own rules, logics, and aesthetics, by way of designing the time and space of this world, its social structure, its narrative, and its relationship with the audience. These aspects are presented through costume and scenographic design, music composition and improvisation, choreography, and audience participation.

Here many elements from our research phase and developmental process resurfaced as the content of the performance. All performers wore costumes inspired by the coastal waters of Tai Kok Tsui, and elements of nautical knotting and wave-like metallic netting were found in the retro-futuristic hand-crafted ornaments that adorned each performer. The audience entered the Ivy Street Rest Garden to hear a soundtrack of interview excerpts from ‘deep maps’ produced by current and former residents. Tap dancers on Tit Shu Street performed a scene of a young urban professional meeting a nostalgic old man, who danced to the accompaniment of a musician whose character embodied the rhythms of changing times. At the Anchor Street playground, street dancers choreographed a performance about chance encounters and serendipitous jams, which were common in the street dance scene of Tai Kok Tsui. Chan Hing Social Service Centre hosted a small exhibition where the audience could write mementos in response to the prose and poetry on display, which were written by our community facilitators.

In our design, each audience member was invited to feel and experience Tai Kok Tsui in the here and now, as they were led through the streets by community facilitators. In the final part of the performance, the community facilitators danced with the professional artists, accompanied by the metallic resonance of the handpan and the original instrument made from metal plates sold in Tai Kok Tsui. Eventually they led the audience in a collaborative improvised community dance. In dialogue with each other through their bodies and movement, they collectively built a special Tai Kok Tsui memory. The performance was both a farewell to the neighbourhood as they knew it, and a warm welcome to its many open futures.

Doing dramaturgy in community performing arts requires an intensive process of deep listening and understanding of a place. This process of listening allows for ‘call and response’ – from keenly observing the ‘calls’ of a community to generating a creative synthesis through the performing arts in ‘response’.

In closing, we would like to share with our readers three keywords in our process-oriented dialogical dramaturgy, in response to the three Re-s of RE: Tai Kok Tsui. The keywords proposed by the Hong Kong Arts Centre curatorial team are “Reconnect, Reimagine, Reposition”. Echoing them, our keywords are:

·      Relationality: Building community together is about building relationships and connections. In bringing professional artists together with community members, we aspire to build genuine connections with one another in the process from research to creation.

·       Reciprocity: Relationships are deepened by reciprocity. From a non-hierarchical perspective, we make place together and explore the characteristics of this neighbourhood through mutual learning, shared discovery, and co-creation.

·       Response: From the basis of reciprocity, we open our bodies and senses to become receptive to the scenes of the streets. We look out to the wider community, and respond creatively in the here and now through performance.

In the ebbs and flows of time, Tai Kok Tsui will always be the stage for the memories, dreams, and aspirations of its residents.