Review-Girl Talk-Hong Kong Arts Festival
9-3-14
By: Stephanie Ip
Commissioned and produced by the Hong Kong Arts Festival and directed by Lee Chun-chow, Girl Talk is a double line-up of two new works: Big Girl, written and performed by Rosa Maria Velasco, and Paper Duck on the Run, written and performed by Santayana Li.
While both plays represent the inner struggles of two very different girls, and how they come to terms with them, Big Girl was Velasco’s poignant homage to her own late father, and her struggles to overcome her grief; while Paper Duck was an angsty and critical look at a “fine arts academy” in Hong Kong and the lack of support for arts in general in the city. Both plays were about an hour long with a twenty minute intermission. Big Girl was the first performance, starring Velasco and Chu Pak-him, who was mostly silent apart from playing music.
The first thing that struck me about Velasco the moment she stepped out in a floor-sweeping white gown was that she was effortlessly funny. Holding a sunflower in one hand, she gave an Oscars acceptance speech and thanked everyone from Julia Roberts (a fellow nominee) to Jude Law (for simply being hot). She also later on starts a monologue in Mandarin because it sounds better, and also berates society for making life harder for women - “men are clean when they shave, and manly when they are unshaven, while people in the office wonder if something’s wrong if you wander in without makeup.”
Velasco is also very creative. I especially enjoyed her court skit, where acting out both sides of a court trial, she points out all the flaws her father has given her - “Your Honour, my client thinks the Defendant should not have arranged for her to be a woman” - and then defends her father by pointing out all the unique things she has inherited from him. At that, Velasco as herself, falls silent, and her spirited demeanour starts to crack - you see that she is vulnerable, that she is in grief, and that she is finding ways to cope.
The bag scene was also genius. While squabbling about why she needs a huge bag, which was equal parts hilarious and moving, Velasco pulls up her dress around herself and turns her outfit into a zip-up white bag. The bag not only implied that she comes with baggage, but the white zip-up bag is later explained to be the way her father was transported from the hospital bed to the funeral parlour. The seamless interaction between fashion (the dress really was quite pretty) and theatre was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Cheng Man-wing, the costume designer, must be applauded.
Velasco is incredibly talented, and not only at imitating her grandma’s Spanish-accented English. Considering that this was a deeply personal story, she managed to pull her audience in and tell them how much she loved her father without actually having to say those words. I am a sucker for father-daughter themed plots, but I am pretty certain I was not the only one who shed a tear for Velasco’s dynamic performance.
On the other hand, Paper Duck, for me, fell flat in the second half of the show.
The play opens with a lowered down surtitle box, reading, “I’m the usher… I’ve been asked to participate in this production…” etc. while a man’s voice moaned and groaned and screeched in the background. Li then appears on stage and proceeds to run around in circles. In fact, the whole play involved a lot of reading off the surtitle box and the projector screen, and also of Li running around in circles. She didn’t really say that much. When she did, she told us about her failing her acting assessment and being kicked out of school.
I would like to say I understood Li’s play. I would like to say that I wouldn’t instinctively rate a play down just because I don’t understand it. I would like to say that it is unconventional, that it’s very different, and that it’s a breath of fresh air. I’ll even skip over the fact that I did not catch the meaning behind the scene with the chair.
Li’s work attempts to question the audience and her teachers on what is the criteria for being good, for passing a school assessment. Did being different automatically mean she wasn’t good? Was it not worth any points for trying? For being creative? She also criticizes the government, referring to the infamous 2013 Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts graduation ceremony, where a group of graduands humiliated the Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. And she criticized the procedure behind government-funded projects, in which she claimed that they were not selected for their art, but because they were the lowest bidders.
But ultimately, what I didn’t quite like about Paper Duck, was not so much the point of Li’s work but the way it was performed. Not only did it come across as a continuation of a drawn-out demonstration by yet another post-80s political student; I also had mixed feelings on the play because I felt like the whole point of her work was to get back at the teachers who didn’t appreciate her back in the day. It came across as slightly immature.
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