Review-The Buying Game 2.0-CCDC
12-7-14
By: Tom Hope
This revival of ‘The Buying Game’, first staged at the Cultural Centre’s Studio Theatre in April 2013, is also a reworking. (It’s also a one night stand affair, as part of CCDC’s 35th anniversary celebrations, so if you missed it last year and missed it again this time, you’re going to have to wait a while longer for a re-re-run viewing opportunity.)
As choreographer Noel Pong writes in her programme notes:
‘I received the restage notice out of the blue and that it’s being on a large stage really surprised me. As everything was unexpected, I didn’t know what to think, so I chose to give up thinking.
‘On the Sunday before rehearsal started, I forced myself to stay in and prepare. Staring at my videos, I started to relearn all the moves. That desire to create burns again.
‘In the rehearsal rooms, my mind reactivated at the sight of the dancers’ devotion. So I recreated, restructured and combed through the work proactively…this roller-coaster ride is something I’ve never experienced before and this could not be achieved by my power alone…’
I missed the show myself first time round so can’t say precisely what’s changed but there’s new music along with new moves and maybe new themes to go with. The cast and creative team, however, seem the same.
With that in mind, I’ll not dwell on how this version 2.0 might or might not outstrip version 1.0 and simply take it on its merits.
These are significant, with breathtaking lighting (by Goh Boon Ann and Low Shee Hoe), sound design (by Ha Yan-Pui) and costumes (by Charfi Hung) to complement the choreography.
That choreography covers a lot of ground (and genres), interspersing rapid-fire group routines with slo-mo pas-de-deux/trois/quatres and a whole lot more besides.
The music to which it plays (most of the time - there are memorable moments when the whole company moves mesmerizingly through silence) is strikingly atmospheric in ways which always seem appropriate to the dancers’ motions.
In short, you’d have to be deaf and blind (or asleep) not to respond to the production values of this 60 minute (without interval) piece as the corps of 12 works its way through sequences which are sensational as much for being so surely rendered as for what they suggest about the way we commoditise relationships, the apparent thematic underpinning of the show.
But that’s where it seems to me the show doesn’t fully deliver – on its title and the promise that title offers. Hong Kong, as a centre of business and finance, is a place where it seems just about anything can be bought and sold, including human beings and happiness; plenty of scope then, I thought, for free thinking fun - and funky props – in exploring the show’s strapline of ‘Buying Dreams or Being Trapped?’ And yet, and yet…
The piece’s quartet structure (four sections titled The Mall, The Dressing Room, The Wardrobe and The Belief) hints at a narrative based around a day out shopping in Hong Kong.
Early in The Mall section, a voice-over introduces the King and Queen of Shopping, who proceed to rock each other’s joints but (so far as I could tell) do nothing approximating ‘shopping’ in a conventional sense.
Clothes are then dumped centre-stage and for most of the rest of the show they stay there - to be admired and rolled in, put on and taken off and then packed up into shopping bags for group-re-dumping into the orchestra pit – but there’s no sense from this of what sort of buying game is being played.
Instead, we see reiterated – and often beautifully realized – suggestions of how skilfully integrated the human form can be, one to another, ending (usually) in disjunction or disavowal, rendered through an austere symbolism rather than the humour and drama which a strong narrative could afford.
When, for the final section, a man in a pink suit led the rest of the group a peripatetic dance, I was further mystified and that section’s title ‘The Belief’ merely deepened the mystification. Why was he wearing pink? (Ok, so it’s the same colour pink as the shopping bags toted by the black-clad shopper lady depicted in the show’s poster/programme – but so what?) And what did any of this have to do with ‘The Buying Game’?
The conviction of the dancers throughout suggested they had a pretty clear idea of what they were trying to communicate on Ms Pong’s behalf. After an hour of watching them in action, I was none the wiser as to what that might be beyond a technically virtuoso exploration of what a really good dance troupe can turn its bodies to when suitably empowered and resourced.
For this to be a truly stunning show, more needs to be done (I respectfully submit) to demystify audience members like me as to its true intent and/or to integrate the various dance pieces with the show’s overall ostensible ‘buying’ concerns. A clever title, strapline and marketing imagery (of black-clad persons toting pink coloured shopping bags) may tease and titillate but does not in the end achieve the requisite lift for the sort of thematic take-off this show seems to be seeking.
The Buying Game 2.0 has now closed. For more information, click here.
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