Jockey Club Local Creative Talents Series Dance Opera: Love Streams by Various, Sun 27 Mar 2022, From (2022/2022), Conductor Vicky Shin, Hong Kong Cultural Center, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR China

A masterfully conceived dance-opera with a stellar cast of outstanding dancers from the Hong Kong Dance Company, renowned opera singers, and a live music ensemble Love Streams is one of the highlights of this year’s HKAF, featuring a stellar ensemble formed by dancers from the Hong Kong Dance Company, in addition to twelve renowned opera singers, choral performers, and musicians. It is the first dance-opera produced on the Local Creative Talents Series platform, and possibly the first ever original production of its kind in Hong Kong. At the helm of this ambitious venture is Hong Kong’s very own talented and acclaimed choreographer and director Yang Yuntao, and a stellar creative team, including composers Chan Hing-yan and Daniel Lo, and librettists Yi Heng and Wong Yi. A challenging production to mount, the two-act dance-opera interweaves the chamber operas Heart of Coral and Women Like Us, commissioned by HKAF in 2013 and 2021 respectively. The music featured in Love Streams will be newly arranged, elaborated and re-interpreted for an ensemble of 20 musicians. Heart of Coral celebrates the tumultuous life of Xiao Hong (1911–1942), a contemporary of Eileen Chang and perhaps the most celebrated female woman writer of the 1930s. She lived her short life with love and a spirit of freedom, the land and its people ever in her heart. Women Like Us is a tribute in song to Hong Kong’s literary grande dame Xi Xi (1937–) and a tale of two women finding the courage to face the shadows of loneliness and find hope in solitude, inspired by the protagonists of Xi Xi’s beloved short stories A Girl Like Me and The Cold. Be it the frosty winter of the Chinese hinterland in the 1930s, or 1980s urban Hong Kong, the yearning for love finds its fate determined by historical, political and social forces in two narratives linked by the underlying feminist perspectives of two of our most important modern writers.